OT Open Office help needed

[Tim Streater]

I specifically included a number of protections for previewing mails, such as removing all javascript and disabling any http links in the mail.

[newshound]

Word behaves like that now, but at least it gives you clear warnings about what it is doing. While I am in principle quite keen on freeware, I've regularly found Word clones to be more trouble than they are worth.

Anyone who tells you they are compatible with "real" word and have the full capabilities is telling porkies.

For a sharing relatively simple document you would probably be better off using WordPad. Or Google Docs.

[Tim Streater]

Don't forget that Word is even not necessarily compatible with itself, even on the same platform.

[newshound]

Well no, but backward compatibility for .doc files was pretty good. And to my mind the Office 365 subscription is pretty good value for money.

[Robin]

Does your app automatically change the settings for File Block (part of Office since 2007 - AIUI for Mac as for Windows) so as to automatically open for editing any old file? May well suit you but it would seem to me a dangerous policy for most users.

[Jeff Gaines]

That is definitely odd, does it save the file back to the attachment?

Not if you've ever spent any time in a witness box it isn't!

[Tim Streater]

That may well be the case if you use Office a lot, which I don't. I was quite happy with Office 2008, but it is 32-bit so had to upgrade to Office 2016.

[Tim Streater]

You'll have to enlarge on that, as I have no idea what you are talking about.

[Tim Streater]

My app is not opening the file, sorry, perhaps what I put was a bit ambiguous. What I meant was that as the attachments are shown as a set of icons you can double-click one and the assigned app for that attachment opens it.

Never been in a courthouse. Closest I got was to being called as a witness in a drunk-driving case, but when we got there we weren't called as Chummy had decided to plead guilty.

[Robin]

You are stressing that you can open attachments from within your app with 'no fiddling about "saving" them first'. But I assumed (and you have now confirmed in your post at 09:37) that it is not your app as such that opens them, it is the assigned app. My point is that if the assigned app is (for a Word doc) Word 2003 or later then document may not open, or may not be editable when open, because of the File Block feature (in the Trust Centre) introduced in 2007:

And FWIW what you describe - "the attachments are shown as a set of icons you can double-click one and the assigned app for that attachment opens it" - seems to me the same as in MS's Outlook. That only requires you to save to a different file if you want to save changes - as I would think essential in software designed for business use and desirable for others who want reliable records.

[Tim Streater]

That's a matter between the file and its opening application, and is nothing whatever to do with an email client, which merely acts as a transport terminus.

Indeed, and in other clients too, notably Eudora.

Doesn't suit my use case, or any use case that I've ever had.

[newshound]

I ran the home box for at least 15 years with a pirate copy of Office

2003 that a colleague bought back from Hong Kong. I did have more up to date versions on client's machines. I do use Word and Excel most days and I reckon the 365 deal is OK.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I haven't found a case where libre office didn't work except massively macroed excel shit which I dont bother with anyway.

I remember once being part of a mass mailing of a Word document that only the latest version of Word could open, And after upgrade, libre office. I emailed a PDF to all the recipients who couldn't read it.

And had to email the author showing her proof that PDFS are more standard than word documents.

[Tim Streater]

Fortunately some people have figured out that sending PDFs around is what you do. Others continue to send Word docs, which I immediately edit to fix up various things, such as they don't know how to set the language to UK English. Or they think a computer is a f****ng typewriter so after entering the text, they press Return 20 times.

At work, I used to get people asking me why, when they printed their doc, the printer always put out a blank page at the end.

[newshound]

It won't handle Word references, cross references, and endnotes properly. DAMHIK.

I've had that sort of experience too.

I'm currently editing / co-authoring a book with half a dozen other main contributors. I suspect that we are not all on Office 365, but actually we have had very few problems (and most of them from people creating "fake" sub-headings, captions, and references).

[Tim Streater]

You mean instead of using the styles, they just typed in text with Normal style and then formatted it to look like a heading?

[ARW]

Will do. But again work has got in the way of doing a simple task.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You are probably a member of the less than 0.1% who actually use more than the basic functions.

I wish there was a word-processors that didn't have all that complexity, so the simple stuff was easy to use and easy to find.

Frankly it takes longer to set up a style to do what you want than to simply type the thing and hand add the styles, for the most part.

Only when you are engaged on a large document where you have pre-determined a few styles and effectively banned the rest, does it make sense. And wouldn't it be nice if only the styles you needed for that document were on display, as well as only the fonts? Where are the font managers..

[Robin]

MS Word has long had the ability to restrict the styles available: Review > Restrict Editing (in my 2019 - may vary between versions).

[The Natural Philosopher]

If I can be arsed, I will look for that in libre orifice, now I know it may be there. Next time I need to write more than a page