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

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: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: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: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.

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.

Try LyX

[hummassa]

It's LaTeX, but graphic. Really nice.

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.