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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."
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?
Go to "Save as" and select the type ".txt". You'll never have to worry about formatting isssues ever again.
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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..."
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
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!)
Why do you use an interactive editor to do piddling changes? That's what sed(1) was invented for, surely?!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
... what could we give them?
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
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 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.
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.
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.)
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
It's LaTeX, but graphic. Really nice.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
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.
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.
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.)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Among the major differences are that:
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".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.