SRS, Jon - LibreOffice is getting better at interpreting Microsoft document formats. I can now get many Excel macros to work, which wasn't the case a couple of years ago. There's a recent new version (6.2) but there seem to be a few teething troubles, at least on Linux.

I spent a lot of time 4 years ago looking for a good, user-friendly relational database application for Linux and failed to find one. LibreOffice Base gave me many problems. In the end I acquired Filemaker Pro and run it on WinXP in a virtual machine. It's expensive but I've been able to develop complicated membership and invoicing applications very rapidly.

Phil