Excel now runs sweetly in gnome. I have to say Excel opens my
pricebooks from suppliers far, far better than open office (which
crashes or runs very slow on about half of the pricebooks) They are
just too big or have too many bookmarks. Since the suppliers
collectively send me a dozen or so spreadsheets a week, this is quite
a big issue. Quatro Pro in Windows environment does a much better job
of opening suppliers' pricebooks than open office or any of the Linux
ones I have loaded on gnome or KDE.

You might want to try Ximian's edition of OpenOffice.  It has been updated/patched significantly to be more MS compatible.  It defaults to saving files in Word and Excel format even to aid in interoperability with Windows users.  It also has nicer icons. :)

Regards 




--











Oliver Jones § Senior Software Engineer § Deeper Design Limited.

oliver@deeper.co.nz § www.deeperdesign.com § +64 (21) 41-2238