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#31
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible with Of
Another incompatibility of OpenOffice.org with MS Office is that OO can open
corrupted files which cannot be opened by (or even crash) MS office. |
#32
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
On 04/07/2010 11:48 PM, RayLopez99 wrote:
On Apr 7, 11:57 am, ceed wrote: On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:59:30 -0500, RayLopez99 wrote: I've heard that Open Office is at best "99%" the same as Office Word, but I'm concerned with it being 100%, since many of my Word documents are complex. I am negotiating legal contracts and the last (less than) 1% incompatibility forces me to run Word under Crossover Linux. My employer let's me use Linux as my work OS, but I am required to support Word 100%. The main issues are little formatting differences when I edit a word document and save it with OpenOffice, and change tracking which doesn't always work reliably. Anybody have experience in OpenOffice with complex documents? Is it true that somethings just won't translate properly to and from Office Word? If keeping formatting exactly like it was in the word document is important you will see some problems using OpenOffice. There's good advice here for getting OO to play as nice as possible when working with Word documents: Yep, yep, yep. Ladies and Gentlemen--I introduce for your consideration Exhibit A, marked "Ceed". Ceed is a skilled white collar professional, dealing with multi- million dollar negotiations. You just don't put anybody in charge of this kind of work, as I've been there and done that. Ceed has an open mind about Linux--as you can see, he's not prejudiced against Linux but to the contrary uses Linux (which is more than I would do). But Ceed knows who butters their bread--and it's Microsoft Office suite, specifically Word. You don't play games by sending a document to the other side in "Open Office format" anymore than you would play games by sending it in "WordStar", "WordPerfect" (which ironically was the de facto standard for legal documents years ago), or Unix "LaTex" for that matter. Basketball analogy: when you have a open unopposed shot at the basket and you need two points to win, you dunk. You don't try a fancy three pointer. No need for that. Baseball analogy: you cleanly catch a pop fly ball to get the last out with both hands in front of your face. You don't do a one-handed 'basket' catch from the waist level. Football (soccer) analogy: when you have an open goal, unopposed as the goalie has fallen down, you kick it in with your shooting foot, you don't try and scissor kick behind your back, kick it up in the air and head it in, or kicking it in with your non-kicking foot, or, God forbid, pass the ball to a teammate. Football (American) analogy: First and goal from the 1 yard line to win: you have a future Hall of Fame running back who has already run against the opposing team successfully all day. Give him the ball. You don't try passing or a trick play. Race car analogy: you are in the lead and the checkered flag has been given on the straightaway. Full throttle to victory; you don't give up the lead and let somebody get ahead of you so you can "slingshot" off their slipstream to regain the lead in the last few yards. Office analogy: OFFICE. That's why they call it OFFICE. It does not get simpler than that. I rest my case. RL 99.999% of people couldn't give a rats ass about the .0001% that have the capital to deal with such contracts. For every person who's going to get into a titter and change their minds regarding deals worth $$$$$ over some stupid font (how do these people get into that position in the first place?) there are 10,000 people where the freedom not to be jerked around by some two bit company so they can access their own data is more important. Honestly, it sounds like people who negotiate these deals are the biggest whingers and primadonnas that there are. I know people like that, who get obsessive about the size of the font in a document, etc. Whats worse, is that we are supposed to care for the poor darls. If you want 100% compatibility, then you use the same version of the same software. It wouldn't matter of everyone was using GEOS on Commodore 64's. Hey, that would ensure 100% compatibility too! What if everyone was using GEOS? In the office I work at, people would write documents in MS word, and I couldn't open them with my copy of MS word. With a 'converter' addon installed, I could make changes, but then it would lose details. Haven't come across that with OO. The problem is that people still insist on closed, changing standards. ODF provides an alternative way to exchange documents, which greater interoperability. If anyone is to 'blame', its people who still insist on closed standards, thereby forcing others no only to use these standards, but forcing them to pay $$$'s to upgrade. |
#33
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:48:03 -0500, RayLopez99
wrote: On Apr 7, 11:57 am, ceed wrote: On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:59:30 -0500, RayLopez99 wrote: I've heard that Open Office is at best "99%" the same as Office Word, but I'm concerned with it being 100%, since many of my Word documents are complex. I am negotiating legal contracts and the last (less than) 1% incompatibility forces me to run Word under Crossover Linux. My employer let's me use Linux as my work OS, but I am required to support Word 100%. The main issues are little formatting differences when I edit a word document and save it with OpenOffice, and change tracking which doesn't always work reliably. Anybody have experience in OpenOffice with complex documents? Is it true that somethings just won't translate properly to and from Office Word? If keeping formatting exactly like it was in the word document is important you will see some problems using OpenOffice. There's good advice here for getting OO to play as nice as possible when working with Word documents: Yep, yep, yep. Ladies and Gentlemen--I introduce for your consideration Exhibit A, marked "Ceed". Ceed is a skilled white collar professional, dealing with multi- million dollar negotiations. You just don't put anybody in charge of this kind of work, as I've been there and done that. Ceed has an open mind about Linux--as you can see, he's not prejudiced against Linux but to the contrary uses Linux (which is more than I would do). But Ceed knows who butters their bread--and it's Microsoft Office suite, specifically Word. You don't play games by sending a document to the other side in "Open Office format" anymore than you would play games by sending it in "WordStar", "WordPerfect" (which ironically was the de facto standard for legal documents years ago), or Unix "LaTex" for that matter. Basketball analogy: when you have a open unopposed shot at the basket and you need two points to win, you dunk. You don't try a fancy three pointer. No need for that. Baseball analogy: you cleanly catch a pop fly ball to get the last out with both hands in front of your face. You don't do a one-handed 'basket' catch from the waist level. Football (soccer) analogy: when you have an open goal, unopposed as the goalie has fallen down, you kick it in with your shooting foot, you don't try and scissor kick behind your back, kick it up in the air and head it in, or kicking it in with your non-kicking foot, or, God forbid, pass the ball to a teammate. Football (American) analogy: First and goal from the 1 yard line to win: you have a future Hall of Fame running back who has already run against the opposing team successfully all day. Give him the ball. You don't try passing or a trick play. Race car analogy: you are in the lead and the checkered flag has been given on the straightaway. Full throttle to victory; you don't give up the lead and let somebody get ahead of you so you can "slingshot" off their slipstream to regain the lead in the last few yards. Office analogy: OFFICE. That's why they call it OFFICE. It does not get simpler than that. I rest my case. RL You pretty much sum it up but you use far too many words. -- //ceed |
#34
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:52:52 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom
wrote: http://is.gd/bilIL- http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9864262-68.html Many of Writer's advanced features aren't supported in Word, such as page breaks and custom hyphenation. The article (from early 2008) is out-of-date on this particular: Writer retains Word's character and paragraph styles fairly well, but graphics aligned in Word as characters don't convert to Writer. This is no longer true -- OpenOffice provides explicit support for Word's handling a graphic as if it were a character. If I send an OpenOffice edited contract to some customer legal I always get a "that's not how it looked before" or "the paragraphs looks different" or even "I think you need to upgrade Office". Since this is work I do not have time to look into what for me is details, but for legal is major: If something doesn't look /exactly/ like it did it can't be trusted. And these people are not interested in me telling them how great odf is and how these changes are trivial and can safely be ignored. I use OO for as much as I can, and we are beginning to see odf contract templates around so I am hoping I will be Office free in a couple of years. I was really happy when Crossover came along. It meant I could ditch Windows forever. It will be even better when I do not even need Crossover anymore. -- //ceed |
#35
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible with Office Word?
ceed wrote:
On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:52:52 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote: http://is.gd/bilIL- http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9864262-68.html Many of Writer's advanced features aren't supported in Word, such as page breaks and custom hyphenation. The article (from early 2008) is out-of-date on this particular: Writer retains Word's character and paragraph styles fairly well, but graphics aligned in Word as characters don't convert to Writer. This is no longer true -- OpenOffice provides explicit support for Word's handling a graphic as if it were a character. If I send an OpenOffice edited contract to some customer legal I always get a "that's not how it looked before" or "the paragraphs looks different" or even "I think you need to upgrade Office". Since this is work I do not have time to look into what for me is details, but for legal is major: If something doesn't look /exactly/ like it did it can't be trusted. In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers -- I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person. |
#36
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:48:26 -0500, Peter Köhlmann
wrote: If I send an OpenOffice edited contract to some customer legal I always get a "that's not how it looked before" or "the paragraphs looks different" or even "I think you need to upgrade Office". Since this is work I do not have time to look into what for me is details, but for legal is major: If something doesn't look /exactly/ like it did it can't be trusted. In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers True, there's some differences between versions of Office and I do at times get "you need to update your Office installation". However, among my customers it's a much more "acceptable" having Office version problems than if I tell them I use OpenOffice. I do not like this situation and wish I could use OO all the time, but it seems like it will take some time before I am totally free of it. To me the most important aspect of this is that I can work and play without Windows. There was a time where I needed to dual-boot. I do not want that back. -- //ceed |
#37
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
On 12/04/2010 07:48, Peter Köhlmann wrote:
In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers I concur with that - I have NEVER understood why the printer should have a bearing on the DISPLAY of a document - but it does. Totally weird. |
#38
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
Gordon wrote: On 12/04/2010 07:48, Peter Köhlmann wrote: In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers I concur with that - I have NEVER understood why the printer should have a bearing on the DISPLAY of a document - but it does. Totally weird. Because different printers have different capabilities. Margin requirements for paper handling, fonts etc.(set your default printer to a "generic text printer" and see what happen) |
#39
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible with Office Word?
"Bob I" wrote in message ... Gordon wrote: On 12/04/2010 07:48, Peter Köhlmann wrote: In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers I concur with that - I have NEVER understood why the printer should have a bearing on the DISPLAY of a document - but it does. Totally weird. Because different printers have different capabilities. Margin requirements for paper handling, fonts etc.(set your default printer to a "generic text printer" and see what happen) yes but that should only be a factor when PRINTING, not DISPLAYING....a PDF document looks the same on ANY machine, no matter what type of printer is attached. Why should a Word document not do the same? |
#40
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Do you use OpenOffice and do you find it is not compatible withOffice Word?
Gordon wrote: "Bob I" wrote in message ... Gordon wrote: On 12/04/2010 07:48, Peter Köhlmann wrote: In that case: Stay away from *any* version of MS Office, too. Because it does *not* render the documents completely the same between versions. Not even with the *same* version, but different printers I concur with that - I have NEVER understood why the printer should have a bearing on the DISPLAY of a document - but it does. Totally weird. Because different printers have different capabilities. Margin requirements for paper handling, fonts etc.(set your default printer to a "generic text printer" and see what happen) yes but that should only be a factor when PRINTING, not DISPLAYING....a PDF document looks the same on ANY machine, no matter what type of printer is attached. Why should a Word document not do the same? PDF is an image file intended primarily for onscreen viewing, while Word documents are designed to be put on paper and so are formatted for the destination printer.(remember WYSIWYG?) Since it's been that way for ~20 years I suspect they figure they have it the way its needed ;-) |
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