Although I don't trust Microsoft, and I hate Word, I must say that Excel still rules. I've been playing around with traffic correlation. I'll write more about that some time soon. But the point here is that a simple approach involves just multiplying one traffic stream (bits per 10 msec bin) times another, and summing the products. If there's time offset, due to latency and clock error, it's necessary to look at the sum of products for many successive 10 msec offsets. Anyway, on a machine with an i5 quad, 8 GB RAM and SSD, running Debian 7.6 x64, LibreOffice Calc chokes on spreadsheets larger than a few MB. But Excel 2010, running in a Windows 7 x64 VM with 4 GB RAM and two CPU cores, handles spreadsheets larger than 100 MB. I'm sure, by the way, that there's a far-more-efficient way to do all that with shell commands and/or Python. I'm just saying that LibreOffice Calc can't handle it.
Yep. I've used stats packages and am handy enough at coding, and still when it comes to it, Excel gets the job done for big data sets. I'm also a fan of MS OneNote, partly because it's bizarre that Word never went down the tab route so you would end up with a cluster of windows. Also, it's very good at handwriting recognition. Mind you, running those apps can be done in a VM, which may make all these distinctions moot - Linux has the tremendous advantage in the VM space of not being subject to the insane licencing arrangements demanded by MS. Back to the theme of the thread, it might be that the focus has (annoyingly) moved away from the desktop onto mobile, so it feels like the doldrums all round. It's really annoying when tiny mobiles have higher screen resolution and quad-core than your laptop..... The glacial progress in desktop cpus (for a bearable price) is annoying, and it matters when it comes to wanting to run multiple VMs. And I think this reflects in all desktop products, software and hardware.
Have you also tried Softmaker FreeOffice? The differences between Softmaker FreeOffice and Softmaker Office are listed here. According to reviews quoted on their website it's fully compatible with MS Office but faster. Perhaps worth a try.
