Agreed. The problem is not unsolved, though docx files recently forced me
to make manual modifications to my Open Office so as to be able to read
them. Fortunately, I expect this problem will become rarer as formats become
relatively standardised.
regards,
Darryl
On 28/11/2007, Terry Hancock <
hancock@anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>
> Denton Andrews wrote:
> > We are all using word processors, whether proprietary or not, if we are
> > practicing law. We may also be using some forms of proprietary time
> keeping,
> > administrative management, or other law office tool ( which usually
> works
> > only on a Microsoft OS) But if you try to convert your office documents
> or
> > try to talk to someone who only uses Word, or whatever, you must have
> the
> > software on your OS to convert or communicate. Without some way to
> > immediately convert or translate the document, you are going no where.
> The
> > programmers of the world seem to be oblivious of this problem. I think
> that
> > is because they are not word processor specific. They do not appreciate
> the
> > communication problem we are facing.
>
> It has been a couple of years since I have seen a DOC file that Open
> Office Writer (v2) can't open. I still make a point of complaining about
> the use of DOC files just for the principle of the thing (and because
> people keep sending me 65 KB emails in order to express 10 lines of
> plain text), but in practice, they are not that hard to deal with.
>
> When I did see problems, it was with exotic documents like fill-in forms
> and/or heavy use of application embedding -- which probably aren't even
> compatible between different versions of MS Word, so you're going to
> have those problems even with MS Office installations.
>
> In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that OpenOffice.org is MORE
> compatible with MS Word than MS Word is!
>
> To me, it seems that the bulk of DOC files that are transmitted via
> email contain nothing but plain text formatted as business letters,
> which is a bizarre waste of bandwidth, regardless of what OS you are
> using. In some cases it would've been less wasteful, not to mention more
> precisely formatted, to render the document as a GIF or PNG image and
> send a pixel-by-pixel representation!
>
> My main complaint is that OOo still seems to take an eternity to start
> despite all of the claimed speed improvements, and since I don't use it
> for anything except reading DOC and ODF files, I don't usually leave it
> open. I suspect this is true of MS Word, though, and I imagine this
> isn't so much of an issue for people who use OOo Writer for most of
> their word processing needs.
>
> So is there *really* an unsolved problem here?
>
> Cheers,
> Terry
>
>
> --
> Terry Hancock (hancock@AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
>
>
> --
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