OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

Michael D. Setzer II mikes at kuentos.guam.net
Fri Sep 30 07:30:52 UTC 2005


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On 29 Sep 2005 at 15:22, Mike McCarty wrote:

Date sent:      	Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:22:42 -0500
From:           	Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net>
To:             	For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Subject:        	Re: OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out
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> Tony Nelson wrote:
> > At 10:50 PM +0930 9/29/05, Tim wrote:
> > 
> >>On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 14:26 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> >>
> >>>When I use OpenOffice, and want to save something that I created using
> >>>MS Office, I find that it frequently wants to warn me that
> >>>I may be losing some special features. For this reason,
> >>>I have abandoned using OO for editing stuff created with MSO.
> >>>
> >>>I don't know enough about these things to know whether anything
> >>>in the files are actually at risk, but rather than lose them,
> >>>I re-boot to Windows and do the editing there.
> >>
> >>Do a test...  Usually, the warnings about things like how some document
> >>formats mightn't support some styling effects, might not do tabs or
> >>margins in the same way, etc.
> > 
> > 
> > As a programmer, foolish warnings such as the above "All might not be safe"
> > disgust me.  If the code thinks that something might not work, the author
> > is responsible for making it do the right thing.  In this case, make the
> > file in a temporary place (and this is the only responsible way to do it
> > ever) and notice if anything didn't make it through the export process.  If
> > that happens, /then/ warn the user, tell them what got lost, and ask what
> > to do.  Such a warning actually means something that the user might care
> > about.  If they don't use any non-exportable feature in a document, they
> > won't get any warning; if they do, they can at least decide whether to keep
> > using the feature.
> 
> I started to reply to his message, but you said it soooo much better!
> 
> 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?
> 
> Mike


But I've seen the problem with documents being different if it is sent 
to someone also using MicroSoft, but having a different printer or 
fonts. It doesn't print the same. We use to make forms available in 
Word format, but they would print differently on different system, 
with different page breaks. PDF files worked with all printers. The 
only problem was that users couldn't edit the forms, but that wasn't a 
big issue in our case.



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+----------------------------------------------------------+
  Michael D. Setzer II -  Computer Science Instructor      
  Guam Community College  Computer Center                  
  mailto:mikes at kuentos.guam.net                            
  mailto:msetzerii at gmail.com
  http://www.guam.net/home/mikes
  Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
+----------------------------------------------------------+

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
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