I've been testing Openoffice.org's compatibility with Microsoft Office on Microsoft's ubiquitous platform. There are a couple of formatting niggles, but nothing that bothers me too much. I work for a small company, and MS Office is hugely overpowered for our needs. We don't use MS Access. We have no VBScripted Excel files, and since I'm the most tech-savvy person at the company, I don't plan on writing anything using those tools -- ever.

I was already using Thunderbird as my email client, and its Lightning plugin for calendar functions.

I was using Tomboy Notes' window port for my note-taking tasks (and it was annoying me a little because the windows port is only up to version 0.3 or so, which is buggy and hugely inferior to the latest Ubuntu version, 0.10.2).

The only applications that might have proven to be tricksy to run on Linux were the more specialised GPS and GIS software -- Garmin's Mapsource and ESRI's ArcExplorer.

According to the Wine application database it was likely that Mapsource would run well using wine, and ArcExplorer apparently had a java version that would run natively in Linux.

Effectively I had no reason to work on that other platform, so I decided that I might as well move all of my workplace productivity efforts over to Linux.

Expect a series of articles recording my migration from Windows to Ubuntu Linux at work. It won't be a hugely detailed description. Don't expect a step by step guide of moving from Windows to Linux.

Certain aspects of the migration will be highlighted. Things that went well, things that didn't go so well, and my overall impression of productivity in Linux.