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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."
Huh, strange that Science and Nature are using a standard text editor format at all. You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose(based on my experiences on writing math on computers).
Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash. If any one of these things were to come alone it would not have been this bad, but judging by the reaction from several companies including my own, this i driving people to look at OSX as a viable option.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".
What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?
I'm assuming that they haven't actually converted to non-MS (or non-IBM) systems. That would be just too bizarre to believe. Do you think that they've actually noticed that non-MS systems can usually read files from 20 years ago without problems? Is this some sign of a pending movement in which more organizations will actually start standing up to the Market Leader?
Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
...I would love to say "Ha Ha! Proof that Microsoft's end is near." But this is typical for version changes. If you didn't yet spent the thousands of $$ to upgrade, then you won't be able to read the newer formats. It's that simple. The only real story here is they are pushing ODF, which is nice to see.
My department has started getting Office 2007 files and we find it irritating. We are not ready to go there yet. We have many macros that interface to our database that must be rewritten. It will probably be a year or so before our small I.S. department has time to convert to Office 2007.
The amount of money that will be spent to rewrite code that works with Word 2007 will not be insignificant and the real down side is that we get virtually nothing for our effort!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You failed to explain why the default thing to accept is a Word document and not an Open Office one. I don't know your field, but I am an academic, and have never met a faculty member who was simply so incompetent that he could use Word but not Open Office. If a journal demands something in Open Office and puts up relevant links on how to get it, very few will complain. So why should the default behavior be to accept something that costs the users money, and not accept something that won't?
Regarding generating PDF's, I'm not sure what you mean. We have the free Adobe Reader on our office computers. And Word does not have an option to save as PDF. For that, we have to pay Adobe.
Beetle B.
I'm in law. Feel free to make your own joke here.
Many of our scholars, while they generate terrific scholarly work, are just not computer-competent. I absolutely cannot imagine getting them to successfully install OpenOffice, or their IT departments (which are frequently not much better) to support it. (These are folks who call for support to ask things like "How do I make a table?") If you required ODF, you would lose some submissions from those who actually read the requirement, and get 99% of your others in .doc format (as I said, people don't even think about format -- if they are writing something, they just open Word, hit "Save," and send it.)
Every school I know about buys a site license for MS Office, and either extends that to students (at considerable expense) or *requires* students to purchase MS Office along with their computers. Honestly, the assumption of Word is so ingrained, trying to challenge it in the legal academic field would be emptying the ocean with a bucket.
For quite a lot of journals the submission format really doesn't matter as long as they can get the text and the images (which you often need to submit separately for final submission). The formatting you did is just used for reviewing (and as such only needs to be an approximation of the final format); the final submission is set from the raw text and images no matter what the original format was.
Conferences (and newer, smaller journals) tend to be different in that they really do use the author-submitted formatting, as a base or directly, as-is. Then exact formatting becomes an issue. Of course, look in any conference proceeding and you'll be astonished at the breadth of typographical design that still formally conforms to the same formatting instructions. It's often trivial to pick up the LaTeX-submitted papers (very strictly correct, but with a somewhat formal, old appearance) from early Word versions (thick-set fonts, spacing is all over the place, flush right never really is) and newer Word (OK; pretty neutral appearance though still with strange spacing variability between different elements).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
[p]Macros that have worked even back in Office97 are now broken. A contractor at work tried to go buy Office at any Brick n' Mortar place, and since 2007 is the only one available, he's pretty much screwed... [p]I wish OOo had really good macro compatibility. If it does, let me know (email shown)
If you're using Word 2007, go here for the free "Save as PDF/XPS add-on" that Microsoft originally included in Office until Adobe sued them so ya haveta go get it yourself.
-AC
Nature: http://npg.nature.com/nature/submit/finalsubmissi
# MS Word document (.doc) (preferred)
# Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
# Plain ASCII text (.txt)
# Rich Text Format (.rtf)
# WordPerfect document (.wpd)
# PostScript (.ps)
# Encapsulated postcript (.eps)
# HTML document (.htm)
# MS Excel spreadsheet (.xls)
# GIF image (.gif)
# JPEG image (.jpg)
# TIFF image (.tif)
# MS PowerPoint slide (.ppt)
# QuickTime movie (.mov) (preferred)
# Flash movie (.swf)
# Audio file (.wav)
# MPEG/MPG animation (.mpg)
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/prep_ init.dtl
.pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format)
.ps (PostScript)
.eps (Encapsulated PostScript)
.prn (Printer file for a PostScript printer)
.doc (Microsoft Word, version 6.0 and higher) -- note that we cannot accept files in Word 2007 (.docx) format, as explained here.
.wpd (WordPerfect, version 7.0 and higher)
*
*
*
*
*
*
Science also specifically makes a point to mention:
Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead. Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. So as you can see,Also, FTA, the reason that Word 2007 isn't being accepted is:
Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML.File Deletion is Murder.
I wouldn't call her a push-over, but my wife is an experimental linguist who uses Word (and used Word for her diss). She uses a Mac, but generally upgrade to new versions as they come out to avoid problems reading docs from other people.
When she started working on her diss, I volunteered to learn LaTeX and BibTeX with her, to support her, bought a book on LaTeX, etc. But at the end of the day, she knew Word, and most of her colleagues and committee members used Word (especially the commenting and change-tracking features).
I've certainly known academics who used LaTeX, and even other stuff like roff. But most of the time, they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
-Esme
When did everyone in law stop using WordPerfect? Or was that only ever the standard outside of academia?
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
The first time I opened a 2007 Word document on my machine (with only Office 2003), Word was smart enough to go "Hey, can I download the compatibility patch for you?"
I said yes, and in one click I was able to open the document up. I imagine the same holds true for the other Office apps, though I haven't tried it.
-David
IMO they should just upgrade and start accepting the new format, for one simple reason. Office 2007 features a HUGELY improved "equation editor". Believe it or not, for most things you can come close to what you can do in TeX. This was a huge downside of Office before 2007.
LyX also has the best equation editor I've seen. It's not as pretty as the *Offices' equation editors, but you can enter equations in without taking your hands off the keyboard, and even insert TeX markup that it doesn't understand without messing anything up.
But most importantly: the equations are treated like part of the text, so there's no clicking madly around the edges of invisible boxes that occasionally disappear to the end of the page just to edit something.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
No, they use it because the journals demand it. I'm glad that's changing. Word is crazy, quirky and wastes the users time. It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life. You should know that from all the problems your wife has at times like this when there's no Mac version available.
For collaboration, subversion works great. If it has not already been worked into Open Office and others, it won't take much to do it. All of this is old hat for people who have been combining work from hundreds of people to make free software. The collaboration tools M$ introduced a couple of years ago are late and second rate as usual.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is just a thought BUT maybe they are using Macs - I run a Mac and the Mac version of Word excel, Power Point cannot read the new version of 2007 Office. There is no converter - yet. (Yes, I use Office - but it drives me nuts!) It seems to me that MS is going back to the bad old days of forcing upgrades by removing compatibilities.
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I don't really see any conflicts here. If you submit to a journal, you don't send them source LaTeX initially, because then you have to send 15 eps graphics separately as well and then they have to muck about compiling it. It's easier (for both of you) to send them the compiled PDF or PS, which they can open, see it looks like mathematics, and bounce to an appropriate referee in a few minutes. Then after the referee reads it, the journal can come back and tell you to send along the LaTeX and graphics for publishing.