OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 17:22 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 15:22, Mike McCarty wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>Why should I follow around after OO when I can just boot Windows in
> >>about a minute and a half, and be assured that the doc is ok? If OO
> >>knows there is a problem, then it should tell me. If there is no
> >>problem, it shouldn't frighten me. If it doesn't know, then why should
> >>I use it?
> > 
> > 
> > If you don't save it in a portable format yourself, you are
> > participating in forcing others to join the same proprietary
> 
> This statement is on the face of it ridiculous.
> 
> I needed to write a resume a couple of years ago. I asked my
> girlfriend, who is very familiar with Word, to take my text
> version and wite it up, because the fellow I wanted to send
> my resume to specifically asked for Word format. She did that,
> and I have a copy of my resume in Word format.
> 
> I then decided recently to update my resume. I'm not a documentation
> expert, and don't want to become one. I loaded up my resume, and
> edited it with OO. OO didn't say anything when it loaded my
> resume, and it seemed to edit my resume just fine. When I went
> to save my resume, it said "WARNING WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
> ALERT! YOU MAY BE LOSING IMPORTANT INFORMATION! ARE YOU *REALLY*
> *REALLY* _*REALLLY*_ SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?" (Or words to that
> effect.)
> 
> So I decided that I didn't really really want to use OO. I rebooted
> under Windows, used Word to edit the document, saved it, and
> e-mailed it away.
> 
> And so now I'm part of a vast conspiracy, a contributor to monopoly,
> tyranny, and other evil practices intended to subjugate the peoples
> of the third world, because I saved my resume in Word format instead
> of OO format, when OO itself warned me that it might not be a good
> idea.
> 
> Grow up and give me a break.
> 
> If there *was* a problem, OO should have told me, WHEN IT LOADED
> THE DOCUMENT, that the document contained things that it
> couldn't or wouldn't preserve if I saved it. If there *wasn't*
> a problem, it should have said NOTHING. If the document contained
> things that it could preserve, but only by changing file format,
> then it should have warned me WHEN IT LOADED THE DOCUMENT. And the
> messages should have been specific enough that I could, at that
> moment, made an informed decision about whether to continue.
> 
> It appears that OO is simply remembering what the format it loaded
> was, and noticing that it is different from the format it is
> going to use to save in, and then issuing a lazy-bones message
> which MAY OR MAY NOT MEAN ANYTHING.
> 
> The only way to describe this is LAZY, SLOPPY PROGRAMMING.
> 
> > lock-in.  Its a battle you can't win every time and not worth
> > fighting if you don't have a chance of winning.  But, now that
> > an open standard exists the chances of winning sometimes just
> > got better.  There is no way that OO can guarantee that everything
> > will be correct when saved to a format that had to be reverse
> > engineered and is in fact not consistent across the proprietary
> > programs using it.  Remember that when you play the game, you
> > don't just boot windows and run word, you have to run approximately
> > the same versions as all the other players.
> 
> Oh bull. It read the document. If it found something it didn't
> understand, then it *knows* that and can say something.
> 
> I'll never ever understand people defending crappy poorly written
> software just because it's not MicroSoft.
> 
> NB: I'm not complaining that OO is gerally crappy and poorly written.
> I'm complaining that this one aspect of it is crappy and poorly written.
----
of course you are ignoring the fact that if you use Word and save the
file in a foreign format, you get the same type of warnings.

I guess I don't see the distinction except that the warnings in OO only
come when you save files in .DOC format and in Word, when you don't save
in .DOC format.

Craig


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