I assume that Ctrl Alt F3 takes you right out of X windows
Yes, thats right
and I also assume that SU means Super user and is the same as Logon / Root
Yep.
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.
Out of curiousity, have you tried gnumeric? I have found it to work very well with excel spreadsheets. The only cavaet I can think of is that if your spreadsheet has VBA[1] in it, it probably wont work properly in gnumeric. If its just a spreadsheet however, it'll work fine. [1] Visual Basic for Applications. This isn't the same as spreadsheet functions, like SUM or HLOOKUP etc - they should all work fine in gnumeric. Daniel