Completely OT - bedtime for children

[Tim Watts]

Gmail does too - and works with standard protocols...

[Tony Bryer]

We had a PE teacher, Rocky, an ex-boxer IIRC and hard as nails ... who each Christmas organised a collection of gifts for boys in the nearby Feltham Borstal. It came as quite a shock to see this side of his character.

[Tim Streater]

Because it means I can't move/rename a file for no better reason than that some app has it open. WTF? The computer is supposed to serve me, not the other way around.

When I was still working, I did everything except mail on a MacPro. I used Eudora-win on an XP lappy because it's the only mail program worth a damn. Typical thing that happened was a mail would come in, and Eudora would strip the attachments out and put them in the Attachments Folder (a Good Feature because it prevented the mailboxes being gigabytes in size). So I'd open the attachment, typically a Word doc, decide it was one I wanted to keep and that I wanted to study more carefully. I always forgot that Windows has this brain-dead attitude, and tried to move the attachment to where it needed to finally live, with a view to doing that while I remembered, and then carry on looking at it. KA-BOOM - rude teeth-grinding message from Windows saying I couldn't do that.

[Tim Streater]

gmail and hotmail are mail domains, nothing to do with the software you're running. imap and pop mean something completely different. Most mail clients can deal with imap and pop.

[Tim Streater]

You can't do either of those in any meaningful way in Word.

[Tim Streater]

Funniest episode we had was, she threw the board rubber, it bounced off the kid's head and went up nearly vertically, but with height and residual forward motion judged to a nicety, so that it went through the little window at the top. We all cracked up at that.

Our maths teacher got angry one day, brought his fist down on the kids desk quite hard. The kid's ink bottle, which was on the desk and open, flew straight up into the air and turned over ...

[Simon Finnigan]

Seriously, you don't think you can add equations in word?

[Simon Finnigan]

It's free, it blocks pretty much all spam, it integrates well with my browser and mail client, it has a nice big capacity, everyone knows hotmail and so can easily guess a contact email address for me if they lose them.

[Simon Finnigan]

You could, but I'd delete them and expect you to sent them in a common format. If were doing business I'd take my money elsewhere.

[Simon Finnigan]

Not true. At my work there is no PDF reader installed on any machine.

[Simon Finnigan]

And what format do you want it saving in? And what if the version they have doesn't support the older formats?

[Simon Finnigan]

How can you know if it'll open if you don't even know what format you can read?

PDF doesn't work for me at work, no PDF reader and no ability to install one.

Acting pompous, calling other people's choices of OS not "proper" doesn't make your argument any stronger.

[Simon Finnigan]

By your definition maybe, not mine.

Good for you. And as others have said, what do you do if the version of office installed doesn't output the old formats?

[Simon Finnigan]

And when they're sent out for people to do homework on?

[Simon Finnigan]

And if they're using a version of office that doesn't output whatever format you want?

It doesn't matter how man times you say it, you won stop people using MSOffice.

If you don't want to open the files then don't :-)

[John Williamson]

Nor does expecting people to use a proprietary file format with limited editing support. The only programme that produces and edits *completely* compliant .pdf files is Adobe Acrobat, and the file format has changed over the years as much as M$ formats.

[John Williamson]

One point that M$ made in the marketing when they introduced the .docx format was that it would be *fully* documented to help others use it.

The OO and LO people seem to have taken it on board quite well.

Attach the reader for the older version of Office as an .exe file. That should get through the firewall. Not.

[John Williamson]

Even Office 97 (The version on my home machine) has an option to add an equation editor plugin at install time which works with all the Office programs. I assume the later versions either have it as an option, or include it by default.

And as for inserting diagrams, there are a number of ways ranging from using the included M$ Draw program to importing graphics from other programs, including M$ Photo editor, also included in Office. Scan into Photo Editor then insert graphic into Word document or Excel Spreadsheet, or Access Database or even a Powerpoint presentation.

All these options are also supported in OO and LO when opening M$ Office files, and I've used them all.

If you want a final output version that the recipient will have trouble altering, then LO 3.x and OO 3.x will let you export to PDF, as will Office 2007 and later, and I use that facility for things like timesheets. What you don't want to do is open a pdf in LO or OO and try to edit it......

[Huge]

[derisive snort]

[Tim Watts]

My sentiments exactly! ;->