Easing Compatibility Between OpenOffice, MS Office

Jane Walker writes "An office suite expert describes how to format documents in OpenOffice and Microsoft office using program features that will make ease compatibility headaches." From the article: "No two office suites are alike, and the more manual, highly controlled items you have in your document, the more likely the formatting will get messy when you go from one office suite to another. But if you use the formatting capabilities to indent and add spacing--well, that's more like just labeling a box Kitchen and putting the box somewhere that makes sense. The formatting tips in this article will also give you more professional-looking documents that are easier to update when the content or formatting rules change."

Comments

Cripes

[XanC]

He sure goes to a lot of trouble to do simple things in a more universal way. Is it the case that the more correct you are about word processor usage, the closer you get to HTML/CSS? Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?

Re:Cripes

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

. Is it the case that the more correct you are about word processor usage, the closer you get to HTML/CSS? Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?

Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.

It would be nice if we were all using CSS/html - but for knocking out quick documents word processors are far easier (even doing things the laborious way this guy suggests)

Re:Cripes

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe when LaTeX stops to be a PITA for anything but ASCII and math...

Re:Cripes

[Anonymous Coward]

Use TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org). A graphical (WYSIWIG) but estructured word processor.

Re:Cripes

[CRCulver]

As a student interested in the whole variety of Indo-European languages and their scripts, I do multilingual typesetting with LaTeX with little hassle. Any modern LaTeX distribution allows input in UTF-8, so the sky is the limit. See my guide LaTeX for Classical Philologists and IEists .

Many publishing houses produce all their output with LaTeX, so saying it's useful just for math doesn't reflect its actual usage.

Re:Cripes

[Anonymous Coward]

The situation certailny seems to be better then the last time I played around with LaTeX, now if somone could tell me where to find some documentation about making hyphenation patterns for LaTeX, editing myspell data and using myspell from emacs... The troubles of using Latvian...

Re:Cripes

[1u3hr]

but for knocking out quick documents word processors are far easier (even doing things the laborious way this guy suggests)

Actually, it's not laborious. What he's doing, though he doesn't explain it, is building a style sheet. (Or perhaps "document template" as I think Word calls it now.) Once you've done that, you just tag a paragraph with the appropriate style (one click) and you're done. Most paragraphs keep the default ("Normal" usually) style. Word, and I assume OOo, come with a large gallery of prebuilt styles, though it's not hard to roll your own, as he does. Sadly Word has dumbed down the use of styles so much that they change capriciously, trying to anticipate what you want, and usually getting it wrong, but confusing the application of local formatting (i.e., of text selected by the cursor) with that applying to all paragraphs with the same style. Older incarnations, as in Word 5 for example, took a little RTFM, but then were quite stable and easy to use.

All good DTP apps use the style model, as of course does CSS HTML. But if you look at any HTML produced by an MS product, you see an entangled mess betraying the convoluted hash that is Word formatting -- endless FONT codes, layering on and cancelling each other, for instance.

Re:Cripes

[the_womble]

Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.

What about Lyx? Simpler than a word-processor, near enough WYSIWIG, nice clean pdf, html, plain text or postscript output.

Re:Cripes

[Anonymous Coward]

Try docvert.org -- it'll convert MSWord to HTML. Typically they shouldn't be making CSS for each page anyway.

Re:Cripes

[david.given]

Actually, it's not laborious. What he's doing, though he doesn't explain it, is building a style sheet. (Or perhaps "document template" as I think Word calls it now.) Once you've done that, you just tag a paragraph with the appropriate style (one click) and you're done.

I wish.

I'm afraid that while this does work for very simplistic documents, as soon as you start going anywhere near structured text it all breaks down. The problem is that there's no containment model on OpenOffice; you represent a section containing subsections as: section header, body text, subsection header, body text, subsection header, body text... In order to do anything useful with it programmatically, you need: section { header, body text, subsection { header, body text}, subsection { header, body text }, ...}

This means that as soon as you start getting non-trivial documents in OpenOffice, you lose the ability to usefully transform or manage the document via an external tool, because you don't have the structure information you need to do this. At a simpler level, it also means that any block of text can have at most one paragraph style and one character style --- you can't have a chunk of 'code' inside a bigger block of 'URL', for example.

I've been trying for years to find a WYSIWYG structured text editor to let me write, among other things, Docbook. Periodically I go back to OpenOffice and Abiword and KWord in the hope that they've got better, struggle for a bit, and then give up --- they're just inadequate for such things. Apps like Lyx and Texmacs are better, but they're really weird and have poor Docbook support. Currently what I'm using is the Vex plugin for Eclipse, which while being clunky and difficult to use, does at least provide a decent WYSIWYG view of my document. (No, I don't want to use a text editor.)

There's a big hole here; there seem to be very few applications that provide this kind of thing, I suspect because it's Really Hard. It doesn't mean I don't still want one, though... any suggestions?

Re:Cripes

[Frogmanalien]

Fair point- it really isn't that difficult to create a plain text document editor which can apply "themes" to documents. So why haven't we got one that is user friendly and avialable on the market (particularly a free one). If it added easy publishing to a webpage and was transparent to users I can't see why it couldn't co-exist and maybe even beat the bulky and OTT office packages on the market today.

Re:Cripes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There's a big hole here; there seem to be very few applications that provide this kind of thing, I suspect because it's Really Hard. It doesn't mean I don't still want one, though... any suggestions?

I've wondered the same thing for a while. As a programmer, it doesn't strike me as particularly hard to represent some sort of structured/nested style information, but it certainly is different to how all WP/DTP software works today AFAIK.

I find it a great irony that HTML/CSS is pretty poor as far as decent typography goes, yet provides the one key stylesheet feature that classical WP/DTP software all lacks.

Re:Cripes

[1u3hr]

There's a big hole here; there seem to be very few applications that provide this kind of thing, I suspect because it's Really Hard. It doesn't mean I don't still want one, though... any suggestions?

I'm not really sure what you're trying to do. Perhaps you want an outlining tool? MSWord does have a mode to do that, but it's famously buggy and unstable. I suspect that some coding environments might have a lot of the structure, but not the typographic features. There were some tools back in the DOS era that I sometimes came across that did this. That's one of the costs of the MS Office monoculture: since about 1995 it's become weird and geeky to use anything except MS Word; and any other surviving word processing apps seem to have their main focus as mimicking every feature of Word.

One of my authors long ago used to use an outliner called Framework, it's still around but I haven't used the current version. I'm concerned with editing and layout rather than creating new text. DTP apps tend to be either linear (code based) or visual (pasteboard metaphor). You generally have to transition to just thinking about layout towards the end of the process. I still use Ventura, a code-based layout app that allows fairly easy revision even at late stages of layout, though it's now moribund under its owners Corel.

Re:Cripes

[colinrichardday]

No, it wouldn't be nice if we were all using CSS/html. How would I write math?

Re:Cripes

[Aram Fingal]

Apple is actually using the concept of CSS in Keynote (which is their competitor to PowerPoint). I don't know if their XML based file format contains actual CSS code but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it does. If you think about how presentation software ought to work, this makes quite a bit of sense.

Re:Cripes

[tzanger]

Many publishing houses produce all their output with LaTeX, so saying it's useful just for math doesn't reflect its actual usage.

I'm trying to find some kind of latex front end that I can give to the people who make the manuals here... We've gone from Word to Ventura and dabbled a little in FrameMaker... nothing seems to do quite what we want, so I'm looking at latex. Lyx is a little weak here, and the other products I've found are either quite old (TrueTex) or geared heavily toward mathematical publication (Scientific Word). PCTex seems to be about the closest (write in word, mangle in PCTex, export how you want) but that seems to keep some of the biggest encumbrances I've got (people trying to do proper layout in Word).

Any suggestions? Our manuals are about 100 to 250 pages long, some diagrams, but mostly "Parameter Foo: values 1,2,3, meanings x,y,z, caution, warning, application hint, see Parameter Bar (page 50) and Baz (Page 90)" type of things. Some charts, and a display shot for each parameter... Nothing fancy, but lots of cross referencing.

Re:Cripes

[CRCulver]

This sort of documentation is exactly what DocBook is meant for, and it is easier to organize such material with DocBook than using LaTeX. You can write DocBook XML and convert it to XSL:FO easily. Unfortunately, there's no good Free Software XSL:FO > PDF converter, just proprietary solutions.

Re:Cripes

[afidel]

You would use MathML which is supported nativly by Firefox 1.5+ and with an available selection of plugins under older version of Mozilla and IE.

Re:Cripes

[colinrichardday]

But MathML is XML, not HTML.

Therefore, LaTeX rules

[adriantam]

As title.

Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules

[CRCulver]

I must agree. I use LaTeX now for everything, big or small, and I could never go back to a word processor. The system is designed for high-quality typesetting of manuscripts, and it excels in that, but one can use it for other things as well. If I just need a quick note, I can just use the article document class with no \settitle, and it works just like a word-processor. I find the letter document class very nice too, regardless of what some naysayers might say.

The only problem with marketing LaTeX to (tech-savvy) everyday users is that the available print documentation is rarely up-to-date. For example, LaTeX is now capable of handling UTF-8 input, which means a variety of scripts can be typeset in the same document with little problem. There's no reason to use older encodings like ISO-8859-1. Yet, even recent books like the second edition of The LaTeX Companion still talk as if we are stuck in the dark ages of limited encodings.

Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules

[shutdown -p now]

LaTeX might be somewhat hard to grasp for many existing users though, with the lack of anything even remotely resembling WYSIWYG (say what you want, but most people still prefer the bold text to be immediately visible as bold, not wrapped into some weird tags). Of course, for those, there's LyX and TeXmacs.

Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules

[ortholattice]

LaTeX is now capable of handling UTF-8 input, which means a variety of scripts can be typeset in the same document with little problem. There's no reason to use older encodings like ISO-8859-1.

Perhaps that's OK if you're the only one who's going to edit the document and you stick to one editor and platform, but the problem is that the "rest of the world" inconsistently implements Unicode (without even getting into the horrible default handling of advanced math Unicode characters in Internet Explorer, that with FireFox work fine...).

I use a variety of text editors on different platforms, from vi to ones you've probably never heard of. One of the big advantages of LaTeX is that I can edit a document on any of them. As soon as you start sending me text files with UTF-8 (or UTF-16) characters, I can never be sure if what I see on the screen is the correct character (if it displays at all, instead of being a gray box), and even if it is, I typically have no idea how to type it it (what 3-key combinatation of alt/ctrl/whatever does this particular editor expect?). In fact even in ISO-8859-1 I don't like the upper 128 because I never remember how to type them in. 7-bit ASCII is, simply, universal and will never be obsolete. (And even that suffers from 3 different cr/lf standards, so I can't edit a Unix text document in Notepad without converting it, but at least that's manageable.)

Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules

[lamber45]

As soon as you start sending me text files with UTF-8 (or UTF-16) characters, I can never be sure if what I see on the screen is the correct character (if it displays at all, instead of being a gray box), and even if it is, I typically have no idea how to type it it (what 3-key combinatation of alt/ctrl/whatever does this particular editor expect?). In fact even in ISO-8859-1 I don't like the upper 128 because I never remember how to type them in. 7-bit ASCII is, simply, universal and will never be obsolete. (And even that suffers from 3 different cr/lf standards, so I can't edit a Unix text document in Notepad without converting it, but at least that's manageable.)

Sure, UTF-8 is a little bit brittle; but I don't see what the big problem is with extended characters. That's what alternate input-methods are for, or, if I want a really obscure character, I can just look it up.

Now it's true that Slashdot seems to edit out 16-bit characters in comments for some reason...

A simpler way

[iamdrscience]

Go to "Save as" and select the type ".txt". You'll never have to worry about formatting isssues ever again.

Re:A simpler way

[uNople]

I agree. I just migrated my finances spreadsheet from openoffice calc to a text document. I expect to spend way less time waiting for it to load.

Re:A simpler way

[Anonymous Coward]

I am guessing you don't live in a non-english-speaking country with international characters like åäö? It's a bitch, even when using .txt!

Re:A simpler way

[hey]

Perhaps the solution for KISS internation characters is an XML file like this:

Stuff åäö

Re:A simpler way

[Anonymous Coward]

.txt doesn't mean ASCII, you can have UTF-8 .txt files.

However you need structure, which is where XML DocBook/TEI or LaTeX comes in. In the same way you can't make 192Kb/s audio from a 32Kb/s stream, and you can't make a wallpaper image from a thumbnail, the rule with documents is that you can't add structure where none exists. You can derive lower-quality version from a highly structured document, but you can't make PDFs with bold, headings, and hyperlinks out of .txt files.

So you need structure and typically - for non-technical people - that's in MSWord styles mapped to DocBook elements, or LaTeX styles. These can then be converted to low-structured documents such as PDF and HTML.

Re:A simpler way

[Anonymous Coward]

When the legal-eagle types start arguing over "open standards" requirements for purchased technologies, I always laugh because at their root, all of the various suites can save to/from TXT files - which are, by their nature, compliant with open standards. ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc - all fit the bill. Thanks for your comments.

Yes.

[eddy]

>Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?

I know I do.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling, I seriously want to know — is there any reason to use something like MS Word or OpenOffice.org Writer instead of (La)TeX? (Apart from "I don't want to take the effort of learning LaTeX" or "It's against my principles/intelligence to use anything that's not WYSIWYG" which are both certainly valid reasons that I don't dispute.)

It is easier to modify, easier to maintain (change styles, etc), and can be converted into several formats easily, takes less space on your disk, the output looks much better...
I don't see what Word can do better than TeX can't. Could someone give examples?
As far I can see, most Word documents are just paragraphs of text with the occasional table or picture, which TeX can very well do.

Re:Yes.

[mce]

Embedding active hyperlinks in documents could be a reason.

Having said that, I also use LaTeX as much as possible for all the reasons you indicate.

Finally, please note that Word is not WYSIWIG! What Word shows on your screen depends on the default printer you have configured. Send the document to your boss who has a private printer, and he'll likely get something different with tables and figures moving about in ways you do not expect, with suddenly text overflowing the box it is in, and whatnot.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

As far I can see, most Word documents are just paragraphs of text with the occasional table or picture, which TeX can very well do.

Guess what? The argument goes the other way too. Why bother with TeX if your document is just paragraphs of text with the occasional table or picture?
I have advanced knowlege of LaTeX and Word. Just for fun, I've created documents in both that when you print them, it is virtually impossible to distinguish what was the program used to ceate them. I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department. The only thing that remains is to find which one is easier to use for a specific task. Recently I've seen a 150+ pages novel, written entirely in word. This document was only text, with just four or five chapter headings. Honestly I didn't see why the author should have used TeX or LaTeX for this job. In fact, with Word he could concentrate only on typing with some small but usefull features that Word offers for easing typing.
Some of my friends prepare their thesis in LaTeX. When you have lots and lots of inline formulas, LaTeX can potentially produce a better quality output. My own PhD thesis however, did not contain many formulas but instead there was lots of complex tables. I used Word to do it (together with MathType and EndNote). I tried one chapter with LaTeX and foud out that actually I spend more time in LaTeX preparing my tables that doing the same thing in Word. Preparing my template with just a dozen of sytles and some useful VB macros took me round half a day and for the rest of the time I could just concentrate on writing.
I continue to use both LaTeX and Word and decide between them based the job at hand. To me, only the outcome counts not the tool.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are only writing text and fancy formatting can be handled later you've got no business using anything more than a basic text editor with spellcheck functionality.

Re:Yes.

[Fred_A]

I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.

Maybe you don't care about things like proper typesetting and ligatures but for some people these things matter. Even for plain printed text. This falls squarely in the quality department for me.

In French it's even more obvious. For example before a colon or a semicolon you insert a thin space. in addition to the ASCII character set there are numerous accented characters in use, including capitals (which the braindead French keyboard makes difficult to enter, moreso in Windows where apparently you're supposed to memorize character codes). Actually English uses a lot of accented characters as well via the import of foreign colloquialisms although omitting them doesn't seem to matter much (déjà-vu vs. deja-vu). All of this is handled gracefully by TeX and is apparently made difficult on purpose by most word processors.

Anyway there *is* quite a bit of diference in output quality between a random wordprocessor (Word, OOWrite, etc.) and *TeX. You presumably just don't have the eye for it.

Re:Yes.

[Crizp]

I wrote my new CV today. They wanted it in "doc, pdf or txt" - certainly a non-choice. Hello, vi! Other formats available on request ;)

Mind you, plaintext has its pitfalls too - I'd hate for the people to discard it on grounds of "it looks like a mess!" because they opened it in Notepad...

Re:Yes.

[jrschulz]

Embedding active hyperlinks in documents could be a reason.

I don't know what an "active" hyperlink is, but my LaTeX documents always contain internal and external links. This very easy with the package hyperref. Regular \ref macros are automatically made clickable internal links in the PDF and the \url macro creates external links.

Re:Yes.

[izam_oron]

I tried one chapter with LaTeX and foud out that actually I spend more time in LaTeX preparing my tables that doing the same thing in Word

You know, they have a graphical frontend to make that sort of stuff in LaTeX easier.

Re:Yes.

[minuszero]

Orders your sections into nice PDF bookmarks, too.

Re:Yes.

[darylb]

I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.

I'm with Fred_A above on this one. If you can't tell the difference between (La)TeX output and Word, you're not looking. The output from LaTeX, typesetting wise, is top notch--ligatures are used, interword spacing is precisely controlled, the whole thing is polished. In Word, attempting to do full justification results in huge interword gaps, making the page harder to read and visually distracting. Even with OpenType fonts, Word (at least on my Mac) can't do a ligature. I note that even the $49 Mellel gets ligatures right.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you don't care about things like proper typesetting and ligatures but for some people these things matter. Even for plain printed text. This falls squarely in the quality department for me.

I care about ligatures, kerning, spaces, etc. However, you should now by this time that in the windows world, most of these are features of the OpenType fonts not the word processor. If a font has got ligatures, even in notpad you get it right. Word can optionally simulate some of these for the fonts that don't have it, but that's all, just simulation and often can be quite wrong. All other points you have mentioned are also only related to the font. So in short, use high quality fonts.

Re:Yes.

[Chelloveck]

I wrote my new CV today. They wanted it in "doc, pdf or txt" - certainly a non-choice. Hello, vi! Other formats available on request ;) Mind you, plaintext has its pitfalls too - I'd hate for the people to discard it on grounds of "it looks like a mess!" because they opened it in Notepad...

You're right, it's a non-choice. PDF! It doesn't matter what program you use to create the content, and it'll look practically the same in any viewer on any OS. As you note, "plain text" is vague and open to interpretation. Line endings and tabs are especially subject to mangling, and carefully laid-out columns are destroyed if the reader is using a proportional font.

Other than ink on paper, PDF is the most reliable path I know to WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See).

(Though I agree with you about content creation with vi. The original format of my resume is HTML created in vi, which I then load into OpenOffice to produce text, doc, pdf, or anything else someone might ask for.)

Re:Yes.

[k3s]

One advantage of LaTex is that it separates information from presentation. Many of the Ph.D papers have to be reformated for the proper widths, line height, etc.

Not to mention one person had to redo 8 hours of changes because his advisor used Mac Word instead of Windows word.

Re:Yes.

[Kadin2048]

Just for fun, I've created documents in both that when you print them, it is virtually impossible to distinguish what was the program used to ceate them. I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.

I have to disagree here. I have done the same thing; when I was in college I typed all of my humanities and english papers in LaTex, because I was trying to get comfortable with it for scientific use, and the difference in output quality was night and day from the ClarisWorks/MS-Word stuff that I was used to.

LaTeX produces output that looks like a book. Word produces output that looks like ... well, like Word. The biggest and most obvious difference is just in how it handles inter-word spacing when you're using left and right justification; LaTeX is much more intelligent in how it chooses spacing and the result is obvious. Hypenation, ligatures, inter-sentence spacing are also all done better in LaTeX. Get used to reading stuff output by LaTeX, and going back to a plain-old word processed document is just painful.

I had people that had never heard of LaTeX comment on how good the output looked. In the end I'm not sure it's really worth the trouble for day-to-day memos (or depending on where you are in life, term papers), but I definitely have to disagree with you about the quality.

I suppose it's like arguing about the relative merits of 128kb MP3 versus FLAC; some people aren't going to notice or appreciate or care about the difference, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.

Re:Yes.

[accordionman]

Aside from the issues already mentioned (type-setting quality and the lyx GUI), there are quite a number of reasons why LaTeX might be preferable for many people currently using WYSIWYG word processors...

Re:Yes.

[ex-geek]

One advantage of LaTex is that it separates information from presentation.

No you don't. LaTeX commands are used with a certain form of presentation in mind:

\begin{itemize}
  \item Apples
  \item Oranges
  \item Grapes
\end{itemize}

Yes, in theory, you could completely change the behaviour of itemize, but 99% of all LaTeX users don't and expect this to produce an unnumbered list. That leaves you with text, which is littered with LaTeX statements to control presentation. It is in fact easier to extract the text of a bulletted list in a word processor, or change it into a numbered list, or transoform it into individual paragraphs.

Many of the Ph.D papers have to be reformated for the proper widths, line height, etc.

That's what styles are for: OpenOffice.org Off-the-Wall: Style Is Everything, Right?

Re:Yes.

[fprog26]

In French it's even more obvious. For example before a colon or a semicolon you insert a thin space. in addition to the ASCII character set there are numerous accented characters in use, including capitals (which the braindead French keyboard makes difficult to enter, moreso in Windows where apparently you're supposed to memorize character codes).

Wrong. If you want something easy, use a US-International keyboard!
Also known as "keyb br" for brazilian under old DOS6. Especially, if you are 'tired' of switching mode all the time.

1. don't use an english keyboard,
2. don't use a canadian keyboard and
3. don't use a french keyboard either.

Basically, with that settings you can type as you would using an English keyboard except that the following keys:
` ^ ' " ~ are accentuated characters!

As a result, the followings are easily typable:

1. ` e => è
2. ^ e => ê
3. ' e => é
4. " e => ë
5. ` a => à
6. ^ a => â
7. ' a => á
8. " i => ï
9. ` i => ì
10. ^ i => î
11. ' i => í
12. ` A => À
13. ' E => É
14. ^ E => Ê
15. ~ n => ñ
16. ~ N => Ñ
17. ` <SPACE> => `
18. ' <SPACE> => '
19. ^ <SPACE> => ^
20. " <SPACE> => "
21. ~ <SPACE> => ~

No more messy, english -> french, especially when Windows decide to change your keyboard settings every 3 seconds, because it thinks it knows better than you...

My 2 cents.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I care about ligatures, kerning, spaces, etc. However, you should now by this time that in the windows world, most of these are features of the OpenType fonts not the word processor. If a font has got ligatures, even in notpad you get it right.

That simply isn't true, as readily verified on my WinXP SP2 system with several professional-grade fonts installed.

Right now, pretty much the only Windows-based applications that make a serious attempt to support the power of OpenType are the major design/graphics programs from Adobe, InDesign and friends. Notepad can't even render unmodified Zapfino properly (nor, for that matter, can OpenOffice Writer) and automatic glyph substitution seems to be completely absent in any form, even standard ligatures.

Re:Yes.

[jonadab]

> Even for plain printed text. This falls squarely in the quality department for me.

It depends where you live. Around here, the only place you _ever_ see a ligature is in a stylized brand name (where its purpose is to distinguish the brand name from the normal English word it's based on), and it is normal even in heavily academic contexts for foreign words and phrases to appear in print sans any diacritical marks that they would have had in their original language: facade, jalapeno, resume, je ne sais quoi, and so on and so forth. (For that matter, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese words are almost always written in Latin characters, even in heavily academic contexts, not because people don't know about other writing systems, but because the Latin alphabet is the standard and more convenient one.) Anyway, Word certainly *can* do oddball characters (albeit, it's a bit of a pain if you don't have a special keyboard), but most people _don't_ do them.

Quite aside from that, you're trying to compare the quality of a wine press versus a blender. They can both make juice, sure, but trying to compare their quality as juice-makers would be bizarre. Arguing the quality of MS Word against TeX is a bit like that, or, to use a more technical example, like arguing the quality of Gimp against Adobe Illustrator. Yeah, they both do graphics, but they represent completely different ways of thinking about graphics and as such they're not directly comparable. Gimp should be compared with Photoshop, not Illustrator. (If you want to compare an open-source project with Illustrator, you could reach for Inkscape, although that's not really a mature product yet. (I use it, and I like it, but it's... not done.)) MS Office should be compared with OpenOffice, not with TeX. (Microsoft does not, as far as I am aware, really have a product that attempts to directly compete with TeX, but if they did, and if they bundled it in with Office, it still wouldn't be used for most of the stuff people do with MS Word. (Whether it would gain any significant traction against TeX is another matter (and really beside the point (and yes, I've done a little lisp programming on occasion (why do you ask?))).))

yes, but

[ajs318]

Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.

The worst example of this I ever saw was a document where the page numbers were typed, by hand, aligned using spaces, within the page themselves {not in the footer}; and there were no page breaks, just loads of hard returns. I was tasked with fixing a minor spelling mistake. This should have been an easy job; but the correctly-spelt word was one letter longer, which caused the line to wrap -- thus making an utter arse of the formatting.

I fixed it, but I got a bollocking for taking too long. I suppose I would have got just as big a bollocking for messing up the formatting.

I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting, warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard. I'll concede that spaces and hard returns do have a place, but that place is far away from proportionally-spaced fonts.

Oh yes, one more thing. Bring back Wordstar/Protext-style rulers which can be inserted into the document anywhere, not just one ruler at the top of the screen which changes as you move from one paragraph to another. It's as confusing as fuck and it's probably half the reason why people use spaces for formatting in the first place.

Re:yes, but

[BrynM]

Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.

What's always bugged me are people on the other end of the sectrum - the ones that make up for a lack of content in a document by formatting the living hell out of it. No, a bullet list is not a paragraph! No, a three page table of contents does not make the content itself three pages longer!

I guess the worst is people who do both such as a title page that has linebreak characters and spaces to center the title on the otherwise blank page.

Re:yes, but

[ex-geek]

Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.

Many? I would say most.
And this includes many geeks who never bother to read a manual and are therefore completely unaware of even the most basic formatting principles of WYSIWYG-type word processors. Believe me, I know a couple of these guys, who staunchly maintain that WYSIWYG is completely unpredictable. Yet most of this supposedly unpredictable behaviour stems from the fact that they are using Word oder Openoffice like a text editor, which leaves their documents littered with invisible formatting elements. These kinds of documents are a hassle to change, as you described, since even fixing a little typo can mess up the formatting of the whole document.

What really speaks for LaTeX is that you can't use it without reading the f***ing manual first.

Re:yes, but

[Technician]

I always enjoyed the "This page intentionaly left blank" in an electronic document.

Re:yes, but

[ajs318]

That's why I so liked WordStar {DOS}, ProText {Amiga, Amstrad NC100} and Wordwise Plus {BBC}. You typed the text, and the computer took care of the formatting. WW+ even used a 40-column screen for typing.

I suppose I'll have to get into LaTeX because it sounds like it would appeal to my mindset. Can you recommend a good website with some tutorials and examples? I'm quite happy with the command line; prefer pico to vi, though!

Re:yes, but

[john_uy]

i like those "page intentionally left blank" pages. oh wait, there's a lot of those returns and spaces to center it. never mind...

Re:yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

The quickest way (as for most things!) is to find someone who knows it and start asking them (or just start copying what they do).
More seriously, you can start at http://www.latex-project.org/ and start following links. Take a look at their intro page, then maybe start reading the usual The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. Be careful not to give up — when something gets overwhelming, skip it and move on.

Re:yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting, warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard. I'll concede that spaces and hard returns do have a place, but that place is far away from proportionally-spaced fonts.

When I use Word in Office XP, many such things are converted automagically through its autoformat rules. The drawback to this is that I actually know what I am doing (was a professional writer for a while) so sometimes the autoformat is not what I wanted. Admittedly, I am probably more of an exception.

Re:yes, but

[ajs318]

Thanks. That seems to be just what I need.

Re:yes, but

[indifferent children]

but the correctly-spelt word was one letter longer, which caused the line to wrap -- thus making an utter arse of the formatting.

Just break out a thesaurus, and start replacing words with shorter or longer synonyms until the formatting stops being an utter arse. You might lose your job, but many documents like that and you might want to lose your job.

Re:yes, but

[Hast]

You seem to have spent more time in Word than I'd like to. At my office we do use proper formatting for our documents.

My biggest problem in Word is that sometimes the sections get messed up. Particularly if you have a list of subsubsub-sections. All of a sudden Word decides that "no, those subsections are unreleated". And when that happens you are *so* screwed.

Basically you have something like

1. Blah

1.1 BB

1.2 BA

1.4 WTF

1.5 Yadda

And so on. Trying to get them into order again is extremely frustrating and using the formatting doesn't seem to help. (Ie the different subsection all belong to the same formatting rule.)

Other than that I've found that Word can crap out on labelling sometimes. Say that you refer to a figure as "see figure *figure1link*" (or something like that). And Word replaces it so it becomes "see figure 1" or whatever is appropriate. But if you cut and paste in documents or if you move the figures around then it can get in a position where it's labelled incorrectly. And again there is nothing you can do.

That's why I prefer LaTeX. Sure it craps out sometimes. But then I can read the errors and fix it. I don't have to manually try and force the program to do my bidding.

Re:yes, but

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

As you imply, the problem with Word is that it's a bit too clever for its own good. I can live without autocorrecting (c) in mid-sentence to a copyright symbol, and not knowing the difference between typographer's dashes, thank you. Compare and contrast with something like (La)TeX or something (X)HTML-based, where it's still trivial to use these characters, but they only change when you explicitly ask for it.

Re:yes, but

[afidel]

Actually the disease you speak of is a direct result of the design of Word and its propriatary format. I was reading an interview with an MS programmer on the Office team and the topic of reveal codes came up, he basically said that because of the way Word stores object's it's completely impossible to have a meaningfull reveal codes feature. This should be obvious to anyone who has looked at the horror which is Office generated HTML. To this day I cringe several times a month when working in Word when I realize just how much easier the task was in WordPerfect.

Re:yes, but

[afidel]

I had a friend who had a nightmare scenario based on what you have described. He had a many page (30+) document with a complex structure, he went in to check something and accidently hit the space bar, it completely reflowed the entire document and autosave preserved the broken changes while he was trying to figure out WTF happened. Undo was no help and he had to copy and paste everything into a new document and redo the formatting because there was no way to bring back to original formatting within that Word file.

Re:yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he try backspace?

Re:yes, but

[afidel]

Of course, once Word decided to reflow the thing nothing removed the new incorrect formatting.

Re:yes, but

[sanjoymahajan]

Can you recommend a good website with some tutorials and examples?

I don't know whether it's good, but suggestions for improvement are welcome for this example/tutorial. A summary of what's there:

This is a sample LaTeX document. You can use it as a start for your own. We give examples of basic LaTeX writing, including using a .bib file for handling bibliographies. We explain how to use the graphicx package to include postscript or PDF figures and the hyperref package to produce an automatically hyperlinked document and to add URL's to your document.

Good tips

[suv4x4]

However from practise, any tips how to react in these situations:

ME: "Please don't use enter for spacing between paragraphs, it's wrong"
CO: "You pedantic freak! It's exactly the same on the screen, and when I print it it won't even be there, who cares?"

CO: "Shit Word is retarded, the tab ends on different places each line, what the HELL is that?"
ME: "Use indenting, it's more predictable"
CO: "Indenting? Why do you never explain what I wanna know, I don't care what indenting is, I wanna fix the damn tabs"

CO: "Oh great, perfect, I wanna make all headlines gray, this means whole hour hunting them down and reformatting it. THANK YOU WORD, BUT NO THANK YOU."
ME: "Man.. this is why I told you to use Headings 1, 2, 3... It's easy to format at once from the styles palette, and you also get automatic Outline view and Table of Contents..."
CO: "Oh shut up, geek..."

Re:Good tips

[cerberusss]

<dream>

I have had great success in advising to use LaTeX in these situations!

CO: "OMG, Word is, like, total crap!"
Me: "I can advise LaTeX."
CO: "Great! Can you get me a Linux shell?"

</dream>

Re:Good tips

[Fred_A]

Doesn't ThinkGeek sell LARTs nowadays ?

Re:Good tips

[tomstdenis]

There is TeX for Windows. It's called MikTeX.

It takes forever to fully install but works decently fine.

Tom

Re:Good tips

[john83]

I found it very easy to install. (download page). I then installed Winshell, and never looked back.

Re:Good tips

[tomstdenis]

it's if you want all the addons.

A lot of the styles/classes are not part of the base install.

Tom

Re:Good tips

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Although to be fair, recent editions of MikTeX have a good system for automatically detecting missing packages and the like, and then tracking them down at your local CTAN site, downloading them, and installing them automatically. I don't know how clever it is, but it's certainly helped me out several times (not that the MikTeX Package Manager is particularly difficult to use manually, anyway).

Re:Good tips

[john83]

I found that Winedit dealt with that without any problem at all (I didn't have to do anything). I know people who use Winshell and had trouble configuring it to download those automatically, but I haven't needed to.

Re:Good tips

[Kjella]

First couple of times: Friendly advice
If they don't want to learn: Ignore them

I've noticed there's a certain class of people that'll much rather bitch and moan than learn a better way. Those are the same kind of people that complain about spy/ad/malware but clicked "ok" to five of them in the last hour. It's a waste of breath.

Not so easy

[Zo0ok]

Haha!

Microsoft Office for Mac and Windows dont handle "Styles and Formatting" in completely consistent ways... not to talk about what happens when you mix older versions of Word on PC with newer.

I'd say: formatting is ALWAYS a mess in MS Word, REGARDLESS how you do it.

My tip: invest some time in a template with just a few styles. Stick to those styles - dont improvise and be creative.

I like to write in HTML, just using P,B,U,I,TT,H1,H2,H3,TABLE (with friends), UL, OL... however, it is hard to print it in a nice way... Anyone has any ideas about how to make really nice printouts from HTML (that look as nice as a LaTeX report) without writing my own XSLT-tranform and make an XSL-FO of everything?

Re:Not so easy

[pimpimpim]

Indeed! As a student I had to do lots of group projects. People wrote parts of the report at home, and we merged it all at a PC at the university. We had already gotten courses in styles, so (almost) everybody used that. Success !?! What happens if you mix different version/document language styles? You just get them all in your document! Very nice... So now we had a main report of which half was in 10pt, the rest in 12pt for standard text, and also lots different heading 1, 2, etc.

The only solution to make this more or less representable was by removing all styles and adding them again. In the end I guess we just prepared the text unformatted, and formatted it at only the end. And please, even worse than styles in different word versions, are the picture inclusions! Our group had a very embarassing talk once, because about half of the included pictures where replaced by a big red cross in the powerpoint presentation. It worked on the PC where we prepared it, so we couldn't have known :(

Latex is also not free of blame, though. Recently the suse versions of our PCs at work got upgraded. My A0 poster layout that used to work is now broken for some unknown reason. Maybe different calculation of length units? If someone could help me out on this I'd be quite happy! (Furthermore the scaling of the newest acroread->print-to-file got broken, so I wasn't able to make A4 previews, arghhhh, updates!!!)

Re:Not so easy

[Fred_A]

I suppose you could use DocBook and then output to whatever format you like. Being SGML (or XML) it's a bit like HTML.

OOo Writer has DocBook filters as well (bit of a work in progress apparently).

Re:Not so easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well ODF is XML and things like Docvert can use XSLT to convert that to docbook, html yadda-yadda

Re:Not so easy

[Sigg3.net]

Stick to those styles - dont improvise and be creative.

Thanks! That's gotta be the worst tip I've heard ever:)
Now I'll just go home, turn on the TV and watch the world rot.

Re:Not so easy

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look at tiddlywiki: See www.tiddlywiki.com.

It is a single HTML file with a javascript. It is great for simple formatting (because of the Wiki text commands. It does nice tables too.

There are a variety of style sheets available, they mostly don't print the sidebars.
There are lots of plugins (including one for html extracts), and one for setting mathematical expressions.

Oh, did I mention it is free??

Ah, but.

[eddy]

warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard.

<CHIME> <A message box appears:>

"Dear User, We have detected that You are trying to do document layout manually. This implicates incompetence. We could put programmer man-power into automagically fixing this issue, but really, it's just cheaper to replace YOU. Instead, We have informed the Registered Owner of this Softwaree. If You are the Registered Owner, feel free to use <ad>Jobs Inc</ad> for finding Your personel! If You are not the Registerd Owner, please don't apply to our advertisment partner. Thank you for ''underestanding''."

In other words...

[Anne Honime]

...Learning good typography skills makes for prettier documents. Yeah. Old news. But alas, it's the purpose of word processors to avoid learning proper typo, and LatTeX is already far better at typesetting than any suite out there.

As long as word processors won't erase superfluous spaces, doubled returns, and start of line tabs, I see no hope of a global users' skills rising.

Re:In other words...

[dunstan]

It amazes me how many corporate document styles will tie down all sorts of specific functions in a word processing package, yet are typographically so poor. The best book I found of the subject was Typography for Desktop Publishers by Mark Hengesbaugh, written when Desktop Publishing was in its infancy, and before people equated DTP with hacking together a Word document and printing it on a domestic bubblejet printer. DTP and word processing has killed the craft of typesetting: the promise was that the drudgery would be removed, but the reality is that the experience and skill of good typography has been lost to the point where even daily newspapers can no longer use dropped capitals properly.

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm less concerned about "highlights" like drop caps than I am about the basics: choosing co-ordinating fonts; choosing the spacing for things like margins, leading, and associating headings with the following text; using correct punctuation; and other design decisions that directly affect the entire text of a document.

This sort of detail isn't just important because it can make a document look pretty, though of course that has its advantages. A well-typeset document will also be be read significantly faster, and with better understanding, than a poorly-typeset one.

It doesn't help that the people who defined the default styles in Word apparently didn't understand basic typography and page layout principles themselves, hence the hideous heading formatting and so on. I find it a wonderful irony that the default formatting for articles in LaTeX was only ever supposed to be an example of what could be achieved, yet still blows away the defaults in many stupidly expensive WP and DTP applications.

I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[iangoldby]

I wrote my doctorate thesis using MS Word 5.1 on an old 68k Macintosh. (OK, it was some years ago...) I learned a lot about Word, and was very careful to use styles for everything, exactly as this article recommends. There were a few limitations - character styles were not supported back then. But on the whole it worked very well and was easy to do.

When I started work a little later I had to prepare reports that then went to a secretary 'for final formatting' before publication. This was presumably to ensure that they followed the house style.

In fact, the first few came back completely garbled. (This was despite the fact that they were already - visually at least - in the house style when I submitted them.) Not long after, an edict came down that we were not to use 'automatic formatting'. When I queried this, it meant no styles, no automatic header numbering, no changing the paragraph spacing with the Format command, etc.

No one ever admitted it, but we all suspected the reason was that the secretaries did not understand enough about Word to realise why they couldn't manually change the heading numbers, why hitting return was inserting a double line space, or whatever.

Even now that we are all using Office 2003, all of our company templates are still set up using direct (manual) formatting.

It's even worse though, because Word 2003 is set up to automatically define a new style every time you manually apply direct formatting to a paragraph. If you look in the styles list for these templates, there are literally hundreds of styles defined there, all with meaningless names.

If only the templates were defined using proper styles and users were educated not to use the buttons on the toolbar but to select a style from the Styles and Formatting sidebar instead, all of this mess could be avoided, and all documents would 'automagically' come out with the house style with no effort at all.

(I'd even like to see Microsoft add some 'policies' to Word so that it can be set up on users' machines to enforce this way of working.)

Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[Atario]

Word 2003 is set up to automatically define a new style every time you manually apply direct formatting to a paragraph. If you look in the styles list for these templates, there are literally hundreds of styles defined there, all with meaningless names.

On the other hand, this does help when trying to un-FUBAR a document that's been willy-nilly formatted this way -- you can click the made-up style's dropdown, pick "Select all ___ instances" and then assign a sane style to the selection.

Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[1u3hr]

It's even worse though, because Word 2003 is set up to automatically define a new style every time you manually apply direct formatting to a paragraph. If you look in the styles list for these templates, there are literally hundreds of styles defined there, all with meaningless names.

Maybe this and other articles here might help.

MS has just so totally fucked up its implementation of styles. I do DTP, and get files from all kinds of people. Not a single one in the last 10 years has been set up using styles in any sensible way. I always have to spend at least an hour trying to rationalise the styles of headings, lists, extracts, and, shudder, tables, before I can get to work on the text. You're right, it was much simpler and easier to produce good documents in Word 5.

Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[mahju]

My thesis in the mid 90s was written on a 486 66. I'd previously written large-ish papers, but the thesis was approaching 400 pages from a distant memory that I'm trying to forget (long, long nights).

Anyhow, going into it, I got put onto LaTeX by my mate, and used that. Apart from doing math equations better & prettier, the mark-up of the final document was great, and intellegent (ensuring that there's not too much white space on pages, that images could be grouped onto an images pages if it looked strange having 3/4 of a page images, etc). But what I loved was the advoidance of the last hour formatting on a regular say, 5 page essay. You could mark it up, print to ps or pdf (cool at the time), and all the headings and layout was right. That 1 hour formatting soon turns into 12 hours when the document is 400 pages long, and you need to ensure that the thing looks right...

In summary LaTaX rocks, but you'll never use it in a corporate env...

Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[manastungare]

Word 2003 also has a feature by which you can lock the available formatting styles to the ones you have defined. If you go to Tools > Protect, and elect to protect the styles, it will disallow any manual formatting: the user must pick from one of the available, defined styles.

But of course, I switched to LaTeX: TeXShop and BibDesk make it a joy to use on the Mac.

Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way

[iangoldby]

Well, that's exactly what I was asking for. You should get a few "+1 Informative"s for that useful bit of information.

Now persuading the powers that be to use it may be a different matter...

Tip #1

[eddy]

>any tips how to react in these situations: [...] CO: "Oh shut up, geek..."

How about ''That's Alpha Geek to you, newbie. Now listen and learn from your betters...''

Depending on setting you might want to slap cow-orker in the back of the head too.

Re:Tip #1

[Fanboy Troy]

How about ''That's Alpha Geek to you, newbie. Now listen and learn from your betters...''

Depending on setting you might want to slap cow-orker in the back of the head too.

You nicely summed up the problem in two lines right there. I used to be part of a team assigned to educate a company's employees on how to use MS Office more efficiently. The inertia I found these people had to learn anything new was amazing. It was topped only by their 'know all' attitude. And we're talking about basic skills here, not VBScripting. I seriously believe slapping them across the face would actually up their productivity more than my polite responses...

Re:Tip #1

[Moofie]

If "CO" stands for "Commanding Officer", I suggest that slapping them in the back of the head would be a pretty bad idea.

Nightmare ahead

[spectrokid]

For all our quality documents, we use Word with some propietary plugin to help with the formatting. You can read and print it in a copy of word which doesn't have the plugin, but wheep he who shall alter the layout! These documents (preferably with embedded Powerpoint which has embedded Excel) get uploaded in our central documentation database, where they are supposed to remain for the next 20 years. I recently needed 3 days to convert my 7 year old thesis to PDF. Something tells me we are in deep shit...

Re:Nightmare ahead

[BrynM]

I recently needed 3 days to convert my 7 year old thesis to PDF.

I had a similar experience years ago (originals typed into a proprietary mainframe based program). I learned to _always_ save a plaintext version a formatted copy of any document I think will ever be read again. Since I learned it long ago, I've seen that I tend to keep the plaintext versions and the formatted versions get discarded. Thanks to this, documents that are over 10 years old are a double-click away and perfectly readable (ok, two if they're zipped).

Re:Nightmare ahead

[petermgreen]

thats ok if your document only contains text and some formatting of said text that you don't really care about.

but saving as plain text will not just destroy formatting. it will destroy diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulae, probablly tables and any other non-textual content.

maybe not a problem if your a programmer type that doesn't belive in flowcharts, uml or anything similar but a major issue if you are an electronics guy or a software engineering guy that uses tools like uml.

finally there is the issue of character encodings. if all your characters are ascii this is again not an issue. but if you are using any other script or worse a mixture of scripts in the same document (say russian text with greek letters for math stuff) then you have to
1: choose a suitable character encoding
2: remember what that encoding is
3: hope that you still have software that can work with that encoding however many years down the line.

Re:Nightmare ahead

[afidel]

That's why PDF is so nice. It's open and documented, and it's an extension of PostScript which has been with us nearly as long as the computer, I have little doubt that I will be able to read PDF formatted documents in 10 years and just slightly more about 20 years from now.

You'd be doing well...

[bunbuntheminilop]

...if you created an open format suited for a word processer that seperated content and formatting like CSS.

Re:You'd be doing well...

[Eideewt]

What, like LaTeX?

Re:You'd be doing well...

[bunbuntheminilop]

/considers install abiword once again.

Re:You'd be doing well...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about OpenDocument? LaTeX is difficult because it doesn't have a container format -- so then the secretaries need to email around all the files and keep them together, and there's no good GUI for it yet (to the levels of say OpenOffice or Abiword or MSWord)

Re:You'd be doing well...

[Ignominious]

What like some kind of open XML based format like OpenDocument?

Re:You'd be doing well...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, like what LaTeX would be if we did it again today, learning from what worked and what didn't for the past few years.

Re:You'd be doing well...

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDocument already does.

Use LyX if you want the gains of LaTeX with a GUI

[inflex]

If you'd like the advantages of LaTeX without having to remember every nuance, then LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ) is definately a GREAT thing.

Since converting to LyX all our documents come out with consistently high quality. Best of all, from LyX you can convert to almost any other format as you need.

Warning: expert at work

[FishandChips]

Too many of yesterday's assumptions in this article. It's about how the user should conform to what the program wants to do or is expecting. The program doesn't like an extra line space between paragraphs, so the user should inconvenience themselves by using styles and formatting instead.

Users are going to do what they do regardless. So I guess the answer is to write much better import/export filters for when files are going to be used in more than one program. It's no good going on about typography either. Most people don't know what that is. But they know a friendly program that produces nice-looking results when they use it. And that is all they want.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't know what that is. But they know a friendly program that produces nice-looking results when they use it. And that is all they want.

Maybe they want ponies as well? At least that is possible without true AI to interpret your mess of Tab-Space-Enters into semantic documents that can be made to look nice.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[FishandChips]

Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case it is the users fault. The user has to tell the program that if a given block of text is a heading or a paragraph, because it can't be reliably detected without undertanding what the document says. Then the program can serve the user by performing good autoformating and better portability--let the computers do what they are good at and the humans what they're good at. Abiword even provides a mode where all you can apply are styles, this makes it easier to work with common document types thus directly serving the user.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[fishbot]

Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.

OK, so lets look at this from the point of view of a developer trying to build a system that serves the user's needs. The users treat the wordprocessor as a typewriter with fonts, but they want it to magically update properly when they move stuff around and change options. So ... what could we give them?

Well, for a start we could give them controls that let them specify how far into the page the paragraph is without resorting to tabs that can get messed up. Let's call that the "indentation". Also, we could let the user tell the software "this is my heading" and it should know how what font to use. We could call them "styles". Hey, and how about if people want a gap under the paragraphs without having to remember to press enter every time? We could have a setting that tells it how big the gap could be!

Of course, this has all been done already. The problem is that the constant bleating of "the software should do what the user wants" is the basic assumption that the software can figure out what the hell the user wants, without even being told! Easy to use software does not mean 'software that needs no manual'. Creating a document that can be properly updated without the leg work of manually reformatting every bit of it, even within the same word processor, requires a slight shift in thinking from 'purely presentation' to 'structure and style'.

The exact same shift in thinking is what causes some HTML pages to resemble a mass of <br> tags and non-breaking spaces, and some to resemble just a handful of <p> tags and let the CSS do the rest. If you are determined that you are going to use <br> and &nbsp; regardless of what is available to you, on the grounds that you don't already know how to do it and shouldn't have to learn, then you deserve everything you get.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[jrschulz]

Too many of yesterday's assumptions in this article. It's about how the user should conform to what the program wants to do or is expecting. The program doesn't like an extra line space between paragraphs, so the user should inconvenience themselves by using styles and formatting instead.

No, the user should put a minimum of effort into learning how to use his tools efficiently. You know, style definitions aren't there to inconvenience users but actually to help them. That using styles makes converting documents easier is just a positive side effect but not the point of this feature. If people know that and still prefer to take the "easy" route - that's fine with me, as long as they don't expect me to help them with the mess they have chosen.

Users are going to do what they do regardless. So I guess the answer is to write much better import/export filters for when files are going to be used in more than one program.

Filters can only guess which incidentally equally (or unequally) formatted parts of a text belong together. They will never beat a user who thinks a second about the structure of their document before starting to write it.

It's no good going on about typography either. Most people don't know what that is. But they know a friendly program that produces nice-looking results when they use it. And that is all they want.

No, they also want to be able to quickly change formatting of similar items (headings and such). This is impossible if the format the "easy" way.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[Ignominious]

OTOH, if OpenOffice aim for perfect import parity with Office formats, they will always be trailing. It would probably influence OO.org's internal workings, limiting any innovation - e.g. Hmm, how about we rewrite the formatting engine to add revolutionary new feature X? Nah, it'd cause too much work updating the Office filters.

I can live with a little formatting discrepancies and looking at Office version differences apparently MS can as well.

I think the best way to win converts to OO.org on Windows, given the Office install-base, is to simply make OO.org better than Office.

Re:Warning: expert at work

[kimvette]

Actually, although OOo may have some serious performance issues, it is superior to Microsoft Office in quite a few ways:

* OpenOffice.org's GUI is better in some respects
        - text layouts in spreadsheet cells for example
        - Conditional styling is slightly more intuitive in OOo
        - Named styles is a beautiful thing
        - Cropping is different than MS office's, but in some ways easier for novices to master
        - I've found that novices find avery label templates in OOo easier than Microsoft's. I found it initially confusing, having been so accustomed to Microsoft's way of doing it for so long.
        - Graphing in OOo has a slightly less steep learning curve than M$ Office
        - External data sources are so easy even a moron can pull data from a database into an OOo document and interact with a database. "Dragondrops" (read it aloud) work really well there! :)

* OpenOffice compatibility with M$ Office may not be perfect, but it's darn good, especially if you compare it to OOo 1.x's dreadful MS Office filters. It allows most users a painless migration path by allowing them to import the vast majority of their legacy data seamlessly with little to no formatting loss.

Is OOo right for everyone? of course not. Just as a BFH is not the right tool for every job (sometimes a screwdriver or wrench is the best solution), Microsoft Office Pro just might be the ideal solution for a particular job, even in light of the $400 difference in price (Free vs. $400).

OOo's performance issues, though, requires at minimum a partial rearchitecture and rewrite to resolve. When dealing with moderate-sized formatted spreadsheets (multiple worksheets with 1200 hyperlinked rows for example) can take 42 minutes to a couple of HOURS to open, where Microsoft Office can open the same spreadsheets in 10 seconds (or 30 seconds for really large ones), and I've found that Office actually opens the spreadsheets FASTER under wine than under Windows, sometimes cutting the file open time by 1/3 or more than natively under Windows. I looked into addressing this issue at my company since the OOo team has repeatedly closed these defect reports as unimportant and their comments on the closing is essentially that adding more features is more interesting that addressing bugs. I looked at the project for a couple of hours and I was aghast at how disorganized the project is. I had my architect look at it and he just rolled his eyes at the code. Can you say spaghetti? Maybe it's improved a bit since then, but I doubt it.

I've said it before....

[70Bang]

...and I'll said it again:

Remember, Microsoft has filed and received a patent for the Microsoft Office file formats in XML.

All it takes is for Microsoft to take their ball & bat to go home via some trojan in the guise of a special security alert, (Patches O'Houlihan appearing to make the official announcements on Patch Tuesday...between teaching rounds of the ADAA -American Dodgeball Association of America ). Tada! MS Office only writes to XML format and Microsoft has an enforceable patent in place. This puts a fence between two companies or even two departments. It's all or nothing. And if you (corporation) attempt to migrate (not all at once), writing is a one-way street. Anyone can read. But that's passive.

The only way to get around it would be a widespread migration away from MS Office in a very, very short period of time.

Realistically, how fast do you think that will happen? Don't use your office by saying, "We can do it!" Look at how many Fortune 100 or 500 or 1000 companies which would have to jump into the fray during a long weekend.

(Microsoft is still waiting on a substantial number of corporations to migrate from Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, and VS6. And they're chasing their tails trying to find out how to convince businesses to migrate by paying lots of money for new software, new hardware, increased TCO. What makes you think they're going to switch to non-MS Office? Seriously. Even the storytellers Huey, Dewey, and Louie, er, Microsoft's vast Sales, Marketing, and PR departments are pounding their heads. They've never faced a defeat like this -- and it's their own damn fault!)

LaTeX forces correct usage

[ex-geek]

He sure goes to a lot of trouble to do simple things in a more universal way. Is it the case that the more correct you are about word processor usage, the closer you get to HTML/CSS? Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?

LaTeX requires you to read at least a tutorial first. Incorrect documents don't compile and nobody will ever litter LaTeX documents with unnecessary formatting commands, since LaTeX commands make the text obnoxious to read.

Re:LaTeX forces correct usage

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen really bad LaTeX --- using math-mode for $emphasis$, for
example.

Re:LaTeX forces correct usage

[vondo]

Yes, and it looks visually bad too, so people tend to figure it out.

Re:LaTeX forces correct usage

[vondo]

There are a couple of other benefits of Latex for collaborating. I understand that Word, et. al. have some facilities to do this type of thing, but I've watched groups of 10-100 people try to collaboratively write a Word document and a Latex document and Latex wins hands down.

First, Latex makes it super easy to break your document into small pieces. Each can be edited separately but the style is applied to the whole. Figures, references, etc. automatically span smaller files.

Second, Latex is text which means you can put all of these small pieces into CVS/SVN/etc. There is no "token passing" in which only one person can be working on the document (or a part) at a time.

from a designers point of view

[nihaopaul]

i'll speak from my years of experiance with page layout, first thing i do when i get a document to lay out is to copy and paste it into notepad, then i use the replace feature and replace " " with a " " then i will convert the quotes and finally i'll remove the soft-returns and replace double returns with a single return and then i'll run a spell checker.

and thats to get the text in a format i can start laying out with, then once its in my layout i'll do tracking a kerning and forced returns if need be by hand. thats after i've applied all the formatting styles from my style sheets

now, i'f i'm working in chinese i'll copy and paste into notepad, replace all numbers with a real number (funny numbers in chinese) replace the " " with a " " replace , . ' " -- with the chinese version and then copy and paste that into wordpad and then into my document.

if only they knew!

Re:from a designers point of view

[ajs318]

Why do you use an interactive editor to do piddling changes? That's what sed(1) was invented for, surely?!

Re:from a designers point of view

[nihaopaul]

tell it to microshaft, i can't find it in my start menu :D

Re:from a designers point of view

[ajs318]

Try looking here.

Trust me, you need at least sed, awk {aka gawk} and grep if you are working with plain text files.

Re:from a designers point of view

[arose]

Or Emacs.

Re:from a designers point of view

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

<resist urge="mock person who understands correct punctuation and typography, yet doesn't use capital letters"/> :-)

Re:from a designers point of view

[nihaopaul]

sorry i didn't realize i could stutter in type, did i say copy writter or english language master? sorry i ment graphic designer :)

only those who understand the rules can break them.

i think you also missed a space after the " and before the /

Re:from a designers point of view

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Only joking! :-)

(BTW, the space is advisory in some contexts - e.g., when serving XHTML as HTML - but not required for XML in general.)

Re:from a designers point of view

[lcsjk]

No wonder I can't understand those new Chinese students! They are still talking with lowercase letters!

Re:from a designers point of view

[ajs318]

The space before the / is only required for older browsers (*cough* IE *cough*) which don't understand XHTML properly {It's valid XHTML with or without it but it's not necessarily valid HTML with it}. Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Konqueror 3.5.2 behave fine without it. They also treat upper and lower case tags as equivalent; upper case is no longer strictly valid XHTML. Of course, the rules also say you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce .....

writing robust documents

[mcn]

Not many people know how to write documents that survive re-paginations (eg, changing margins, paper size, moving from portrait to landscape), exporting to another format, etc. I still wonder if those who attended basic wordprocessor courses are being taught to use the right feature to achieve what was desired.

I used WordPerfect 5.1 long ago and it has trained me well on using the correct code (seen under reveal code) or features for the things I want. Like using Indent at the beginning of a paragragh (for indenting a paragraph), rather than using multiple [Tabs] at the beginning of all lines in a paragraph. Or, a Hard Page Break (still rememver it's Ctrl-Enter) to force a new page rather than multiple Hard Returns (to create empty lines to push text down the next page).

Once a person learns to use the correct feature, his document is definitely more robust and can withstand major reformatting.

Re:writing robust documents

[giorgiofr]

I still wonder if those who attended basic wordprocessor courses are being taught to use the right feature to achieve what was desired.

No. The secretaries need to spend as little time as possible formatting a document and so they're told to hit the fat G (my localization's "bold") and the slanted I and hit return freely. So the document is ready in 5 minutes. Then when the time comes to move a single word around and it blows up in their face, their boss is not smart enough to realize this is due to the stupid way things are done. That's because he himself couldn't do it right, so he does not know where the problems arise from.
That's usually when I am called in and I make a scene (ok, not quite) about using styles and maybe some brainz. But really, by now all hope is lost.
And then, people ask me why I use Word 6. Go figure.

default "save as..."

[xoundmind]

OOO seems to default to it's own formats. Rather that .rtf or .doc. Change this and it will be a lot easier for new adaptors...Like my 70 year old mother using Ubuntu. She uses it to type up her recipes and book club discussions. Emails me everytime a document can't be opened by one of her Windows-using old lady friends.

Re:default "save as..."

[managementboy]

Courtesy of my-trusting-google:

Tools > Options > Load/Save > General. Near the bottom of the dialog, select each Standard File Format and set Always save as to the relevant OpenOffice.org document.

Easy. Maybe shoud be called easyOffice ;-)

Re:default "save as..."

[xoundmind]

She's 70 years old, running Ubuntu Hoary on dialup and lives in the middle of nowhere in another state. Trying to explain that would be....well, that's the whole point. It shouldn't have to be explained. The default should be RTF.

Re:default "save as..."

[managementboy]

I had hoped she had installed Ubuntu herself... ohh she did not?

Maybe I can't follow your argument, first she uses Linux, then she can't click on a Menu called Tools, then select Options?

Well why don`t you change it for her... I am sure she will not notice. I do this trick with my Mother all the time. (ssh into her box and do proactive changes that she does not notice)

Re:default "save as..."

[xoundmind]

I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install. Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them. Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.

Re:default "save as..."

[Ignominious]

You could try getting her to use Nvu or Mozilla Composer (part of the suite, now Seamonkey); that way her documents can be edited in a Word-like way but be as portable as possible, HTML. Also would be easy to upload to a website, should she so desire. Slight email complication if images used though, but then again maybe use HTML email?

The trouble with Office formats are that they are import/export formats to OO.org, and this would tax OO.org unnecessarily, not to mention performance wise. It would be an unfair disadvantage technically and politically.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way of hacking an OO.org configuration file to set another default format.

Re:default "save as..."

[xoundmind]

Perhaps I should have install AbiWord for her at the time? But I think that defaults to .abi, which is yet again a bit of a problem for the non-power users. Lesson learned on this one...leave more time to tweak the install for your relatives! Thanks for any/all comments on this.

Re:default "save as..."

[managementboy]

Well, thats a bummer. I learned from these "problems". My mother is also on dialup (even on an other continent). Thats why I use ssh, and use dyndns.com to provide me with her IP.

As I "have" to do IT service for more than one person in my family, so I don't rely on any "default" way of doing things. oOO configurations are saved in the home directory, making a backup/restore very easy, even over dialup.

My advice is to set up your mothers box during your next visit to be able to do remote admin tasks. It saves you a lot of time.

Re:default "save as..."

[ElleyKitten]

I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install. Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them. Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.

Dude, you installed an operating system on her computer that she doesn't know how to configure and appearently does not have the skills to learn, and you didn't take the time to set it up for her needs nor are you willing to help her when she has problems? You're the ass here, not the OOo and Ubuntu teams that aren't psychic enough to know exactly which defaults she in particular would like to have (and then force them on everyone else). She's your mother, dude, go teach her how to use this operating system and office suite that you dumped on her.

Re:default "save as..."

[Just Some Guy]

The default should be RTF.

It's not because RTF isn't up to the job. If it was, that's what everyone would be using.

Re:default "save as..."

[ElleyKitten]

Perhaps I should have install AbiWord for her at the time? But I think that defaults to .abi, which is yet again a bit of a problem for the non-power users.

Yeah, abiword is a little behind in implementing open document format. I used to use abi and my husband used OO, and it was so frustrating. Now he uses OO and I use KOffice, and we're both happy.

As far as whether they should use .doc or .rtf, I say no fucking way. .doc is a proprietary format that they will *never* be able to implement fully, and .rtf is an old format not designed for modern word processors, and it does not have a spreadsheet, presentation, etc variation or equivalant, while .odt does. Open document is *clearly* the superior format for open source programs, and should be the default. Open source is *not* Windows for poor people, and pretending to be will just hold it back.

Re:default "save as..."

[xoundmind]

You are one seriously disturbed human. How dare you question the actions of any fellow slashdotter in regard to their FAMILY. That is beyond any sense of web fellowship and good taste. You don't know me (and never will) or anything about my supposed lack of support for my mother. (In terms of computers - and more important - in life.) In short:
Get a sense of what is important in life. And fuck off, you horrid bitch.

You've got to think... like a machine...

[WWWWolf]

My small crystallization of the whole word processing: You write text. Computer formats it.

If you want the computer to not mess up your formatting, you've got to think like a machine and understand the structure of the formatting. Humans, by default, only care about superficial formatting: "this is in wrong place, let's move it a bit." Computer sees a bunch of formatting instructions.

The biggest problem with WYSIWYG word processing is... well, basically the exact same problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: You think you have the utter and ultimate control over the presentation, while you actually don't have that luxury. You merely have real-time response to the formatting decisions. Some other day (and in some other version of the program), the formatting decisions the program makes will be different. When using word processor, you have to stop thinking about the formatting and just let it do the thing for you.

Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place.

You have to assume your tab key doesn't know damn where to align the text - if you're submitting text for publication somewhere, it's likely to go completely wrong anyway. You have to not rely on spaces being always "space" width at all. (I export my OO.o docs to HTML which gets converted to LaTeX for PDF generation. HTML doesn't care damn about extraneous whitespace. Neither really does LaTeX.)

If you want to preserve formatting instructions at all, OpenOffice.org's style system is your bestest friend ever. You can't produce robust formatting without that thing, so learn it and learn it well.

In closing, two words: Reveal Codes.

Re:You've got to think... like a machine...

[dodongo]

"Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place."

Jeez, dude. You sound just like the LaTeX manual.

Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Office

[manuel.flury]

Does anybody talk here about OpenOpenOffice ? http://o3.phase-n.com/ They are still promising a release without giving us anything to eat but anyway, be aware that one day, it will be really easy for everybody to switch between all office suite. Manu

spacebar formatting

[skastrik]

Before starting on his first wp doc, I helpfully told a co-worker in advance not to use Enter to create new lines.
Righto!
The day after I had to fix the doc where tons of spaces had been used to wrap to next line.

Poor Type setting skillls

[Nichole_knc]

Difference in suite formatting aside. Most ppl have no idea how to even properly format what they are typing anyway. So when you throw in a program with several dozen buttons to play with and the person know not how to click "help". Well you might get just about any type of style format you can imagine. Not to mention the fact that most editors "set" a users style as a style format for that doc no matter if it is a far left style of not... Dang hard to type without my glasses. Hard on the eyes too...

Try LyX

[hummassa]

It's LaTeX, but graphic. Really nice.

Presentations and Equations

[m0nstr42]

I use Latex for everything I can. Unfortunately not everyone else does, especially for presentations. Recently I've had to work on a presentation in a group that wanted to use powerpoint. I did my part in OO.o and embedded equations as rendered pngs of latex output, but this is a big pain in the arse when it comes to wanting to *edit* the equations. There are a nice packages in windows, osx, and *nix for putting latex equations into powerpoint/oo.o presentations (unhappily, the windows and osx ones are superior b/c they integrate nicely and allow you to edit the equations), but they are all different and aren't really compatible (other than that the rendered output is pretty universal, which is a good start).

Having said that, the equation editors in Office and OO.o are awful for compatibility.

Re:Presentations and Equations

[justaguy516]

Amen. This one issue, conversion of equations from oo to msword
and vice versa is killing all my evangelization of oo in the office.
Anybody has any idea how to do this right. Currently we are saving
equations in image format and inserting them into the document.
Please tell me there is an easier way.

Re:Presentations and Equations

[m0nstr42]

Currently we are saving equations in image format and inserting them into the document. Please tell me there is an easier way. AFAIK this is the only way. Openoffice doesn't even handle that that well. I use a program called eqe to generate rendered pngs from latex, then you can drag and drop the image into oo, but oo continues to look for the image file in the /tmp folder - so I have to save the image from within oo. I know that there are similar tools for mac and windows (for office) that work well, and additionally store the latex source in the image attributes and are nicely integrated so that when you double click the image in your document, the editor pops up with your latex source. I'm not aware of an oo counterpart with the same functionality (eqe is close) :-/

Lyx at least

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone will be willing to change his/her X-Office for LaTex, but Lyx is between them and could do the trick

Use a universal format rather than a .doc

[American Patent Guy]

The big problem, I think, is that everyone is sending each other word processing files. If I receive a .doc, and I don't have Word (and don't want to pay for it) I can view the file, but my program may paginate/format it differently.

Portable formats have been around for years: postscript, pdf, etc. Most recipients aren't interested in editing what you send to them. Just send them a pdf and avoid the problem (OpenOffice 2.0 has a very nice pdf export function.) If it turns out that the recipient wants the text he can cut and paste it into whatever he wants.

As usual, the problem is not in the software; it is in the use of the software.

Suggestion

[gr8_phk]

"I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting"

Instead of writing mind-reading software and popping up a paper clip, they could just make the default document come with page numbers in a footer. This would clue people in that these capabilities exist. Those that just want a simple text document won't mind, or can use notepad, or figure out how to remove the footer. Removing something is usually simpler than figuring out how to add it. Now taken to the extreme, this would be a nightmare - the default document would have headers, footers, and several other default formatting options that would take a lot of work to remove.

Or people could just learn to use the tools properly.

Word processors are overthought

[Nimey]

It seems to me that word processors are over-thought if you have to worry about doing things the "right" way (as defined by the programmers). If I want to treat a WP like a TV typewriter and manually format everything just like we did in Bank Street Writer on my Apple //c, it should be perfectly OK with that. If I then want to intersperse some fancy formatting like bulleted lists, handle it without me having to think hard about it. I don't want to care about these things, I just want to write the stupid way and get it over with.

Is there a (preferably cross-platform) word processor that will do what I want? I don't want to have to write code like LaTeX or just use a plain old text editor (though that's what I almost always fall back on).

LaTeX redux

[Kadin2048]

How would that be different from Docbook?

Re:LaTeX redux

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Among the major differences are that:

• LaTeX is essentially a start-to-finish system, while DocBook is essentially an XML schema and needs supporting tools to be useful;
• LaTeX is fully programmable (if you're sufficiently versed in the black arts), while DocBook only encodes structure;
• LaTeX is readily extensible, while if you extend DocBook it isn't DocBook any more;
• LaTeX's text is quite readable, even when special characters, maths, and the like are involved, while DocBook lays the mark-up on so thick that the underlying text would become almost unrecognisable with heavy formatting.

Ultimately, DocBook is always going to work best as a storage format for an authoring application, rather than as something entered directly by humans. LaTeX's power comes, in no small part, from the fact that you can just "type and go".

OpenOffice PDF export: useful but not great

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OpenOffice 2.0 has a very nice pdf export function.

It's nice that OpenOffice 2 has a PDF export function, but that's a different statement entirely. Alas, the function itself is limited and buggy when put to serious use. For example, it chokes on some professional-grade OpenType fonts, resulting in incorrect fonts being used in the output PDF. It also has very limited control if you're creating documents in OpenOffice that are then sent to a professional print shop. In other words, as a tool for outputting portable documents, it's not bad, but it still has major limitations compared to what a decent DTP app would offer.

Document processors, not word processors

[CarpetShark]

The problem (apart from the microsoft-induced part, with useless and/or closed formats) is word processing itself. What we all need to do is move towards document processing, which will represent data in a way that is meaningful to computers (titles, sections, subsections, addresses, names, code, haiku, etc.), and format it for printing WHEN printing, automatically. This way, you can easily load it into another program, and you don't have to worry about whether the page is too big or too small, or if it'll print the same as it did for the other person; because, an address is still an address, and a section is still a section. If you print it in your organisation, it can be printed in the format YOUR organisation likes, not the sender's organisation's format. Of course, there is still PDF etc. for exact layouts, but that is solving an entirely different issue.

If anyone is still confused about all this, I'd recommend a few days' playing around with LyX.

Re:They will move, like every other fortune 500.

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ Office

Wow, that's so clever. Slashdot has the best comedians.

here's an idea:

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is up with the use of semicolons in formulas which would match Excel if they used commas? How about the default calculation of the log function? Don't expect M$ to change their format, and don't expect people to be happy that they have to change tiny syntax issues in every formula in a large, complex, spreadsheet, each time that they change platforms. Make them truely compatable, so that I can use the same spreadsheet in either Excel, or OO-Calc, without having to translate (manually), each cell, each time that I open the file on a different platform (e.g. If I make a template for a post-doc to use, for data entry, aggregation, &c., I don't want to have to change all of the formulas each time that I send the data to someone who's using Excel/OO-Calc, and change it back each time that data is added from the other. It's a serious P.I.T.A.

The value of trained adminstrative staff...

[SETIGuy]

Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?

Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.

It's weird. When I first came to work for my current employer we used to have something called an "editorial staff". That was back in the day when we were able to afford secretaries. (i.e Un the dark ages when document preparation was considered a skill requiring some training.) Back then all of our secretaries knew troff, TeX, and LaTeX. A large fraction of them could write shell scripts that would merge disparate inputs and output a TeX document (for example merging text into a fax cover page template).

Then WYSIWYG showed up. Document preparation tasks got easier for the untrained, but the duration of those task was vastly increased because the WYSIWYG word processor never quite did what you wanted the first time. Shortly thereafter it was decided that secretarial staff was too expensive, and so all the document preparation tasks were transitioned to engineers, scientists, and executives. We're told that this saves money, because apparently engineers, scientists, and executives don't have anything else they should be doing. Most of the trained document preparers were shoved out the door or transitioned into other work. Secretarial salaries stagnated and now you get fresh graduates from rodeo clown college that have never seen a computer when you try to hire one at such a pittance.

Maybe it would be better if we valued document preparation skills and payed accordingly. Maybe I'm just naive.

Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic

[ElleyKitten]

Does anybody talk here about OpenOpenOffice ?

One thing that worries me about that is that it sends your file off on the internet (or to your server, if you have one you bothered to set up like that). Can't it just convert it right there on your machine?

Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic

[manuel.flury]

You're right, but I didn't find anything else for opening odf files from m$ office.

Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic

[ElleyKitten]

You're right, but I didn't find anything else for opening odf files from m$ office.

I'm sure there'll be something eventually.

Forget compatibility, how about 64K rows!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2006 already, why can't I have a spreadsheet program be able to handle more than 64K rows?!? Excel has been stuck with this forever, I thought OpenOffice would be better but it seems that they have only just broken past the 32K barrier to the same 64K wall. I'll gladly give up some columns, who uses all those anyway :)

Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic

[manuel.flury]

Post the link if you find one :)

Please explain

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

You changed the subject to read that "every other fortune 500" was migrating, but you only quoted three examples (and IBM really doesn't count). I consult for a Fortune 50 (that's fifty) in Europe and I'd like to see more examples of Fortune 500 companies migrating. So, please provide some links to document your claim.

Thanks.

The PDF button

[dbIII]

Emails me everytime a document can't be opened by one of her Windows-using old lady friends.

We really all have to get out of the habit of sending bloated editable electronic documents out by default. The PDF button is there in OOO for making something fit to send out just as the print button is there for making things fit to print. The only reason to send someone an editable document that is not just plain text is if you want them to alter it. I'm amazed by the number of contracts, quotes and invoices that get send out in an editable format just asking for the unscrupulous to add another zero or remove a condition.

MS word can output to PDF too with the appropriate printer driver.

BTW, it makes perfect sense for OOO to default to it's own formats - other ones are moving targets they have no control over.

The modern concept of politeness is bad.

[hackwrench]

I don't recommend slapping them in the back of the head, but I do recommend getting angry at them.

Them:I don't want to know about indenting, I want to fix tabs.
Me:Okay, if you don't do what I tell you to do, I'm going to leave.
...or shut off the computer without saving or whatever.

Re:The modern concept of politeness is bad.

[Fanboy Troy]

The modern concept of politeness is bad.

You're absolutely right. I found that out the hard way! ;)

Apparently, the cat got my tongue

[nerotik]

Oh oh oh, look at me! I'm talking about OpenOffice.org (TM)!!! I'm a super smart geek! No, really, you know what? None of this matters. None of you have any say whatsoever in any standard that comes out of the ISO. So just shut the fuck up, and let the people with actual power do their damn jobs,

Fuck off and die. I hate you all.

They're cheating.

[hackwrench]

I just went through essentially this situation with my cousin's 7 year old. She wanted me to read the passage for her homework, and then she'd answer the questions. Well, she didn't know the right answers from me reading it and then her glancing at the passage for clues, so I told her she had to read the whole passage aloud. She said that she didn't want to read the passage, she wanted to answer the questions. I said that I told her what she needed to do and that she wouldn't get any help from me if she wanted to try to do something else. She crumpled up the page the passage and questions were on and ripped up one of her other schoolwork papers, and then proceded to kick and scream and throw things until she got her way. I told her that I would not let her get her way, and that if I were to get her way she'd just act the same way the next time she wanted to get her way.

Re:default "save as..." ... Kword!?

[pbhj]

Kword, which I haven't actually used much, seems to be simpler in terms of GUI clutter but still quite powerful. I'd have thought it was better for someone new to computers than OOo. I gather it reads and writes ODF and other major formats too.

Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic

[manuel.flury]

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5139606687.htmlC oming soon: ODF for MS Office Some more days to wait until new opportunities in the office suite world !!

You've said it before....

[twitter]

Microsoft is still waiting on a substantial number of corporations to migrate from Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, and VS6. And they're chasing their tails trying to find out how to convince businesses to migrate by paying lots of money for new software, new hardware, increased TCO. What makes you think they're going to switch to non-MS Office?

That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.

Re:You've said it before....

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww, you posted the same thing again. How cute.