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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!
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.
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.
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.
/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.
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.