Completely OT - bedtime for children

How many .doc's sent out are every actually edited by the recipients? People use them as text carriers on email, or for putting out school/company/council notices.

For a start, something that is "standard" will be useable on a variety of platforms. That may or may not be the case with .docx to name one.

Listen - I've spent years explaining computing to people at all levels.

A secretary can cope with a brief instruction written thus:

In Word:

Click "File" -> "Save As".

Now look for the box labelled "Type", click it and a list will appear. Choose the line that says "Word 97"

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Maybe I've just been lucky and worked in places were people aren't utterly clueless, but I don't buy this "they can't cope" argument.

All of which is utter c*ck.

Earlier you wanted it in office 95 format.

The instructions for that should be far more interesting.

PDFs aren't much use, not everyone has a PDF reader installed so they can read that proprietary format and some people wont be able to install one due to the security settings on the machine.

Maybe they should send it in HTML format, everyone has a web browser installed (or do they?).

I won't read HTML mail of course due to the security risks.

Especially when they just lump users from e.g. Office2003 to Office2010 without any training, it'd probably be *easier* for them to fend for themselves with OpenOffice3.x than cope with the new ribbon interface.

That's why it's c*ck.

Don't care as long as it opens.

Public bodies *should8 use full pen standards

But as long as it works for everyone... You see, I don't use MS products. I touch them rarely and I cannot even remember the last time I used MS Office (4 years probably) so you'll forgive me for not being able to quote all the supported formats.

If they use MS, then they do ;->

You should get a proper OS and a proper mail reader, then you'd worry less.

Same here (with the Maths).

But you don't need calculous to work out the gradient of a straight line.

Is this a competition?

I'd forgotton about that "ribbon" thing. But yes:

Anyone who thinks that is less of a jump than going to OpenOffice has just lost the argument.

Anyone who thinks even half the company employees in this country get training to handle Office 10 needs to resume their meds.

People come in on a Monday, see that for the first time, go WTF?! then muddle on just as they always do...

I thought that was deliberate ;-)

There are quite a few "flavours" of .doc formats and you will often find that one version of MSword will not render a document created in another version properly. And then there's docx...

For most homeworks what's wrong with ASCII text? That's about as standard as it gets (especially if you stick to 7bit). Pictures can be included as jpg or png attachments.

I received a 10M PDF file from a school recently. The only useful thing it contained was /one/ URL!

What's so difficult about "File" -> "Save As"?

Anyone can get a PDF reader which will render the document correctly. The same is not true for any MS format.

You must be joking.

Although many schools do have decent secretaries I would not be surprised if many don't since most schools cannot afford to pay support staff private sector level salaries.

I keep getting sent documents where the author has used tabs and even spaces to indent text! It drives me nuts ;-)

Indeed. However many people expect OO to be much more difficult to use. They are pleasantly surprised when they find it is not /if/ they try it. Most don't bother IME.

I would love to ditch Windows completely and use Linux exclusively but unfortunately Linux does not do everything I want.

You certainly can with some. I've done it. [Ctrl+C]

However I still get error dialogs sent to me in jpeg format. Some people even go to the trouble of compressing the picture so small that the text is no longer readable.

Not sure why that is such a Bad Thing.

That is another good point - a lot of people are trying to read this stuff on a phone "on the go" so it is exceptionally silly to do that ^^.

I've told a previous school off for doing exactly the same, but they were pretty thick and didn't understand what the problem was.

And .pdf is surprisingly backwards compatible, though the more modern versions are now starting to not work with my (c) 1987 - 1997 Acrobat

Build a bigger kitchen (this is uk.diy) ;-) That's what we did.

Our kids have all been fussy eaters at some point and we used to cook two different meals. Now that both SWMBO and I work we can't do this any more. We try to cook something they all like and if they don't, it's tough. We can't remember everything they don't like and it changes frequently.

That won't make any difference. Don't your school have a "sibling" rule? They do here which means, if you already have a child in the school, you are higher priority.

IIRC the scheme relied on your employer using a "salary sacrifice" scheme to achieve this. IME many employers cannot be bothered to do that.

Just had a phone call from my youngest's school saying he needs a packed lunch :-( And I left my magic wand at home today.