I have been a user of OpenOffice and its predecessor, StarOffice, for over a decade. I began using it occasionally around 1995, and by 1998 I used it to the exclusion of Microsoft Office wherever possible. It worked well for my mostly-lightweight word processing and spreadsheet needs, and I got very used to it. I fell in love with certain features, particularly the “export to PDF” feature that was sorely lacking in MS Office, and the multitude of exportable and importable formats.
As my skills have grown, so too have my needs. I’ve learned macro languages and formula manipulation in OpenOffice now, and take advantage of a number of other people’s templates that also use these features. At Sammy G’s behest, I began experimenting with Google Docs. I think it’s a fantastic collaboration platform, but unfortunately its lack of support for OpenOffice/MS Office-style macros made it a deal-killer for maintaining some of my spreadsheets.
An example spreadsheet is my budget. It lives on a laptop at my home, and gets backed up to an online repository after every major change. There have been a number of times that a financial question has popped up while I’m away, and I’d like to pull up my budget to consult and figure out where we are at financially. Unfortunately, my current config allows that only as much as I am content to have a read-only copy of my budget on my screen… there’s no way to coordinate writes except saving it back to my online repository, and remembering to update the local copy when I get back to my laptop.
Enter: Ulteo. Could this be the answer?
(Credit to Chris Lejeune for the link.)