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."

Comments

Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

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. You can do all that in MS Word too. So why does your husband use LaTeX? I cannot speak for her husband, but maybe the reason is that most math journals will not accept anything but LaTeX (or maybe AMSTeX). Also, MS equation editor is incredibly painful, using LaTeX is simply so much easier. In grad school I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher, and had to write couple hundred pages in MS Word, with bunch of (relatively simple) equations, and it was one of the most painful things I have ever done.

backlash

[minus_273]

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.

Re:backlash

[jollyreaper]

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. Anyone who predicts the end of Microsoft risks looking like an idiot since these predictions have been going on for decades and yet Microsoft is still here and as strong as ever. That being said, allow me to risk looking like an idiot by agreeing with you. :) I don't see Microsoft going away anytime soon but I think that there are some risks for them out there now that simply did not exist in the past.

1. Office is Microsoft's bread and butter. Everybody used Office so anyone wanting to work with other people had to be in the Office game. Even if there were alternatives that might have been better from a technical perspective, Office was already the 800lb gorilla. People were no more going to switch from Office than they would switch from QWERTY keyboards.
2. The international push by governments to move to an open document format is huge. To do business with these governments, now you're forced to use a different word processor. This sort of mandate helps to redefine the playing field. As you said, on it's own this is not a ballbuster for Microsoft.
3. As you mentioned, Office 2007 is a pain in the ass.
4. Vista sucks.
5. This is another killer factor: you can get Linux on the desktop now, and not just for geeks. I used to scratch my head wondering what people on Slashdot were talking about when they said they had Grandma running on Linux. Not anymore. The latest friendly distros like Ubuntu are ready for normal people to use. Everything they need to see is there, open, friendly, no muss, no fuss. If somebody told me I had to explain Ubuntu to my mom, my first response would no longer be "shoot me now."

While I don't think any of this is going to lead to the inevitable collapse of Microsoft in the coming weeks, I think it could be the start of a downward slide, at least in terms of operating system and office app markets. Historically speaking, powerful and unstoppable kingdoms/empires/corporations tend not to be destroyed from outside but from within. Laziness, neglect, a lack of imagination and vision, all of these things will hollow out the entity until a trifling problem could become the crisis that finally brings the end. The problems we're seeing right now could be the start of that. But given Microsoft's size and clout, I think we'll be waiting a long time for the final curtain.

How strange

[jc42]

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.

As a Mac guy...

[imamac]

...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.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

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.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ajanp]

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it should be clarified what file formats are and aren't allowed currently at Nature and Science since it seems like there is a lot of conflicting information.

Nature: http://npg.nature.com/nature/submit/finalsubmissio n/SI/index.html
# 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.

Automatic Conversion

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Re:So use Lyx

[zippthorne]

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.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[PDAllen]

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.