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Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format
hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."
Why? Because some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use. They type in their stuff, use the equation editor, etc, done.
The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war, only the technical folks. It is a power that should not be wielded lightly, this format war.
Bearded Dragon
It's not important that people will use open-source software for writing documents.
It's more important that MS supports ODF.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.
Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think it's just you.
.. and if you TRULY MUST run Vista on the PC you bought circa 1996, just turn Aero off, Vista works just fine in 2d.
Afterall, w(ho)tf owns a computer in 2007 that doesn't have hardware acceleration?
As for the new Office UI, it is superior to the old in many ways. I realise that that idea is very hard for you to accept (not least b/c all you *nux/FOSS gearheads don't WANT to accept it), but I've been using Office 2k7 for a coupla months and I love it. I think if more ppl would quit pouting about the simple fact that it's DIFFERENT and actually spend some time getting used to it, they'd find that Ribbons and Task-groups are significantly superior to (and vastly more intuitive than) the many-layered, nested menus ever were.
As for the "incompatible" format, I'm not sure what you mean. Given that there's a FREE and easy-to-apply patch available here that enables any version of Office >= 2000 to use the new XML formats, AND since every Office 2k7 application has a highly visible and easy-to-use "Save as Office 97-2003" option, I really don't know what you're trying to say, oh, wait, I forgot about FUD, riiiight, I got it now...
-AC
Science and Nature don't cater to people that spend all day writing emacs macros to prove their lambda calculus theorems, it's for people that wear labcoats and do chemical/biological research. I have a Master's degree in a cellular biology. I've worked with a lot of PhD candidates and tenured professors. Dozens of papers were published yearly. The secretary was more computer literate than most of them.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We're not being elitist, are we?
You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.
And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.
You know what? I'd rather that people not send me either. Don't send me ODF, don't send me DOC. Send me a damn PDF.
Plenty of businesses still own and run old hardware - it still works so why upgrade. In your world the problem is insignificant simply because you have the money available in such quantities that you don't need to care and can afford to be arrogant to the issues others face. The problem is simplistic, how do the remaining masses address your oddball (incompatible) MS-2007 xml document format. Is there a patch or plug-in for Abiword, applixware, koffice, gnome office, openoffice, frame maker, etc, etc, etc. Explain to me why I should lay out the bucks just to run an MS based machine to deal with your standard factory acceptance of the microsoft way.
Sure, there's a free one for other versions of Microsoft Office, but almost none for any other suite. Your logic is intriguing, all us nutjob nux/FOSS gearheads are so apathetic we don't want to accept it simply because it's different. No concept that some of us might be using other operating systems or have a different bottom line that dictates how and why we do things.
The rest of the world isn't as cut and dry as your tiny one.
No, that's a really arrogant statement.
You must write in Latex. It's a more powerful for formatting and avoids exactly this problem. And no, they're not too busy to use it because using Word takes up more time in the long run.
Well, I'm sure a lot of biologists at Stanford will be surprised to learn they're in a soft science.
If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents out of Word 1.0, they likely are hitting the piracy trail today. As things like software dialing home gets more and more prevalent, that might not be even possible 10 years from now. Storing corporate documents, that should be archived, in Word is simply irresponsible.
Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him.
I could believe that being brilliant at computer science implies that you are on the cutting edge technologically and demand only the best for your computing. Being brilliant at math or biology or psychology implies no such thing.
(Though I will say, "superiors" is a bad choice of words. "IT Department," yes, but not superiors.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Adobe did not sue Microsoft about anything related to PDF creation in Office. Even the most irresponsible published articles on the subject only claimed that Adobe was threatening to -- and then, the ONLY source for that assertion was Microsoft themselves.
Think about it for a second. I'd bet it's ten times more likely that Microsoft was worried it could be sued by (just about anyone, Adobe, Nuance, whoever) if they included XPS generation in Microsoft Office, because then they'd be using their monopoly in an existing product to bootstrap the dominance of a new product (or in this case, format) -- the type of thing Monopolies get in trouble for. I'd bet their legal guys went like, er, we might get in trouble if we bundle XPS generation, we should unbundle it.
And then someone inside Microsoft went, well hey, that's going to be pretty stupid if we bundle PDF support but unbundle XPS support. That'd basically be a crib death for XPS. So let's hold PDF back too, and blame the whole thing on Adobe. Microsoft has been trying to claim that XPS is somehow more of an open standard than PDF anyhow, and spreading an uncorroborated rumor about Adobe being litigious about their format is totally harmonious with that strategy.
If this was just about Adobe and PDF, Microsoft would have unbundled PDF but left XPS support bundled in. No published report has explained how any possible Adobe "intellectual property" threat about PDF accounts for the unbundling of XPS generation.
The real truth is, Microsoft is holding back their PDF generation stuff because they can't afford to let it sit any higher on the totem pole than their support for their competing format.
I say bring on a Microsoft PDF READER. Apple has one. Adobe could use a kick in the butt to get competitive in the Reader department, and Foxit just ain't doing it.
LaTeX isn't just good for equations and other science-specific data - LyX and a decent BibTeX manager (I use BibDesk on OS X) are a great way of keeping large volumes of material well-managed for work in any academic field. Without LaTeX/BibTeX/LyX, I would have probably have never finished my (fairly research heavy) undergraduate dissertation (philosophy).
Now I have switched to XML-based formats and use XSL-FO and Apache FOP to turn it in to PDF/PostScript. I have complete control over the whole process and all of it is reusable, semantic and shareable. Add to that the use of the Web to share data openly, and we could potentially hit a nice sweet spot free of both Microsoft Office and it's lame duck open source clones. Part of the attraction of the open source world is getting away from Word and replacing it with semantic markup where I say what I *mean* rather than say what I want the document to look like. That's why OpenOffice et al. are utterly pointless. Open source should be about replacing bad paradigms rather than just porting.
I can't wait until scholarly journals just sit down and write an XML (RELAX NG?) schema and people use a schema-aware editor to write their stuff.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
You'd probably be surprised how many of the "brightest minds" spend eight hours a day doing needless grunt work to accomodate the many peculiarities of Microsoft Office.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.
It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.
Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Editors like things to be uniform. Their job is to get things to print properly at the end of the day - both from a writing and from an "interface with the printers" standpoint - and that's where things can get dicey when using a writing program that the PRINTING industry views an non-standard, which many small press publishers view anything other than Word and .pfd as being.
No, I am not talking about the larger academic publishing houses, but smaller journals often do not have the money to USE the higher-priced academic printing firms and have to play with the smaller companies, simply because these journals have circulations which are quite small, relatively speaking. This happens to people writing their dissertations all the time, too, especially when they have to use serious scientific notation in math, genetics or other graphically-oriented scientific notational areas of research, or have to use lots of color-specific photographs.
Small, short-run print shops are often run by people who are NOT the most capable individuals on the planet when it comes to handling even simple graphic placement problems, let alone handling scientific notational alignment issues and trying to tweak a (to them) unusual text creation program to properly interact with their press equipment. Especially with regards to notational placement and statements that they simply have no clue as to where anything SHOULD go, of course...
Don't believe me?
Ask ANY small-run magazine editor about Printers. You will get an education in a new area of single-strand virology that masquerades as marginally tool-using anthropoids! But beware! The language that they use will be neither pleasant, nor fit for polite company. In some cases, drunken veteran members of the Merchant Marine Service have been known to tell these people to mind their language during such discussions - it can get THAT bad!
Just a word from the other side of the desk - the editorial side...
/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.
/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.
Sorry, looks like you're wrong on that one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Depends on the journal- the mainline Americal Physical Society journals (Physical Review A,B,C,D,E,Letters) accepted LaTeX (made their own macros- RevTex) for years before accepting Word.
Curtains for windows?
When you use LaTeX you get what you wanted fairly quickly, and it comes out the same on any computer anywhere, and you end up with PDFs that do the same, so you can take them to a conference. And journals accept it.
When you use MS word it takes forever to get anything like what you wanted (subscripts on superscripts, tower-type functions?), then when you change something elsewhere in the document or email it to a coauthor something breaks and the equations get changed. And you end up trying to use powerpoint to do presentations, which means you take it to a conference and what appears on the screen is a bunch of hearts and spades instead of the right symbols (seen this happen, just once). Which is why journals generally don't accept it.
LaTeX predates MS word, anyway. Before that, you sent a handwritten or typed paper to the journal, which again isn't going to get there and have all the equations different to how they looked when you wrote it.
That said, if I was trying to write a paper with lots of detailed diagrams I might not want to use LaTeX; it's fine for line and block diagrams (which is all I need for combinatorics papers) via xfig, but I wouldn't want to try to, say, draw some anatomical thing. And it doesn't really seem to handle jpeg inclusion very nicely.
Why LaTeX?! Anyone who ever used LaTeX extensively would find your question insane. The brief answers is - because it is much more convinient, powerful, user-friendly; because it is takes much less time to LaTeX a document than to type it in Word; because Word was never meant to be a typestting/publishing tool, and LaTeX was... It's like asking "You can move around on a wheelchair, why use feet ?"
Really, Office isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be. And LaTeX isn't nearly as hard; especially if you use one of the WYSIWYG editors.