I send stuff to my local council in Open Doc format. They can't read it in Word, so I send them a PDF as well, which they can print out and then retype into Word.
Nobody is aware that this council is wasting a lot of public money.
Owain
Well, you *do* have a bit of a problem . . .
I find that Word misbehaves most appallingly after about 2am.
Bill
Bastard keyboard!
Bill
Owain gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
And all because their IT people can't be bothered to google briefly -
Works is horrible unless it comes with a full blown copy of Word - albeit normally an older version. Have you considered Open Office?
I hate this. If you ask them about it then look at you blankly like they think this is the only way to do. I have given up trying to educate them. There are too many. It's a real pain having to re-edit the documents to make them readable.
100% correct ;-)
Just don't drop the thing in the process :-) Laptops seem to be accidents waiting to happen
My experience also. Documents in Word 95 & 97 work perfectly in OO, and I have only had one problem with Word 2003, but the .docx format in Word 2007 causes severe problems, as does .xlsx in Excel. No doubt Microsoft made it so, but as you say, it doesn't matter who is to blame, it just doesn't work.
There is also the disappointing news that Sun, under whose wing OpenOffice was developed, has curtailed development of OpenOffice by mostly disbanding the StarOffice team. StarOffice is Sun's paid-for version of OpenOffice, the two packages benefitting from each other's development, most of it being done for free because of the way the OpenOffice Foundation was set up. But StarOffice apparently isn't selling enough copies to pay for the team that supports it - not surprising when people can get OpenOffice for free. So development of the two packages will have, or has already come almost to a stop.
To be fair to Microsoft - and believe me, that doesn't come easy! - they have reduced the retail price of MS Office so it is now truly affordable, at least in the base versions.
I still use OpenOffice but every now and again I have to exchange files with someone who uses MS Office 2007, and getting them to save their files in Word 97 or 2003 format so I can read and edit them without problems is becoming very tiresome. I don't think it will be too long before I take advantage of MS Office's current low prices.
Bruce gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
For home users, perhaps.
For business use, though, it is still expensive - Office 2007 Standard edition, retail, is c.£250+vat per licence.
Open Office is good, it can save in PDF, also you could save in RTF but saving as HTMNL webpage whould be the most portable.
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Oh, I emailed them links to the Open Doc standard and the MS website. I'm nice that way.
PDF text layout is far from perfect.
Owain
Owain gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
If the layout is that important, then Word is the wrong tool anyway.
I spoke to soon. It won't accept it.
I then decided to register for the Win7 free update. Wouldn't accept the machine serial number. Turned out I'd read an 0 as an O. On a sequence that went like this:-
ABCDE0G12345678ABC12345 - the 0 being the offending character with no 0 in the number to compare it with. So I read it as a O.
Then the website wouldn't recognise my postcode. Said it was incorrect. So stored my address without it.
I've seen better websites written by a 5 year old. ;-)
I'll not use it much if at all. I use Publisher Plus on my Acorn for any documents I need. If I have to send anything electronically I do it using an open file standard. Like PDF.
Indeed - and I bought it expressly for setting up the ECU in the car. It says Win 95 onwards will work but the old laptop I got first running '98SE couldn't cope.
Why don't laptops have a proper carrying handle?
FWIW Open Office uses ISO26300 for its WP files, a format that can be read & written by a number of other word processors (Abiword, Lotus Symphony, MS Office, Softmaker, WordPerfect...).
Ironically MS Office 2k7 SP2 offers support for ISO26300... MS do not even support their own XML based ISO standard in spite of the effort they put into pushing through the approval process.
BW
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The latest version of Ubuntu also has the advantage that it can be installed within Windows XP whilst still providing dual booting. You can have a common file store using NTFS for both Ubuntu and XP which allows access to Open Office files from either OS.
Cic.
ISTR having a Compaq laptop in the very early 90s that did, and I think a few other vendors around that time did, too. I suppose it was one of the first things to go to save bulk/weight, the theory being that people only ever have the laptop on a desk (or lap) and carry it in a bag otherwise.
I think of the folk I know here, as an OO user I'm the only one who can open docx format - people often email files in that format to me for conversion, because their copies of Word won't even open it. OO at least does it badly - but enough to pull the text out and save it into a more useful format.
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