Slashdot Mirror
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).
That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?
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.
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!
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!
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.
There are a few reasons that Science and Nature prefer Word to TeX. First, they are not nearly as equation-heavy as a pure physics or mathematics journal would be. Second, they've got a publishing workflow that takes Word as an input and ties into the rest of their technology. They don't care how well Word typesets documents, they want common input formats that they can rip information out of and edit themselves.
TeX and LaTeX are great if you've got substantial finicky needs (esp around equations) that you really need the author to get right, and to be able to carry that through. However, to support that comes at a price. As the TUGBoat editors experience on an ongoing basis, publishing a journal composed of arbitrary TeX content from different authors is difficult. Different authors may use conflicting macro packages, or it may be harder to coerce each into the house style.
There is a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Maybe they should research that!
8 6761033.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA1016
I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.
In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.
If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)
I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.
Knowledge of TeX/LaTeX is pretty much a prerequisite in the Maths and Physical Sciences. I'm not so surprised that a CS major missed out. No disrespect, one of my majors was CS, too. It depends on what you typically write, but once you learn LaTeX you might find it hugley more sensible than any WYSIWYG system. I did.
LaTeX generates both Postscript and PDF. I don't know anyone who would submit or accept raw LaTeX source. All the journals I've looked at took either .doc or PDF, with the expressed requirement that it be "a single, self-contained file." You don't get that with LaTeX. Unless you're a masochist, all your references are in BibTeX, and all your graphs are in either PDF or EPS format, not that weird line-draw TeX command thing.
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.
PDF. I've never submitted a paper in anything else. I didn't actually realize that big journals would take DOC either.
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)
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
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.
Lyx allows you to write TeX without having to learn all the funny commands. It's just like how you can use KOffice to write ODF documents or MS Office 2007 to write OOXML documents ;-) There are other LaTeX front ends that allow you to generate documents without having to learn all the tags, but I like Lyx and its free.
Think global, act loco
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.
I submit to some physics journals (Physical Review D, for example). They -prefer- LaTeX source with .eps figures. Though I use BibTeX with an external .bib database for references, I explicitly cut-and-paste the contents of the resulting .bbl file into the main paper draft.
I -think- they'll allow PDF or postscript submission of the whole thing, but it's slower to process, and they might add charges.
For those with older Office (2000 to 2003), why not use the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats? I have not run into any 2007 files yet since I still use 2000, but at least I am ready if any appear.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The point is that they did try and it turns out that Word 2007 screws up the math, even if you save the results in Office 2003 formats. As it turns out, mathematics is the language of Science and Nature. So, while many of us can go thought life without ever writing a contour integral, most of us will never be published in Science or Nature either (the closest I got was Physical Review Letters). Unless you want to assure us that you can handle complex math expressions with you free patches, I would suggest that you have a bit more respect for the staff of Science and Nature. They are reacting to a observed problem. I'll bet you that they tried the free patches before they decided to warn scientists all over the world about submitting articles using Word 2007.
Think global, act loco
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
computer literacy aside, i've noticed that a ton of math and science academics know how to use latex really nicely, even if they don't know much about computers. it makes sense if you're doing a lot of equations/formulas and they need to be legible.
the privacy of one's mind is important.
you do have something to hide.
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.
although it'd be nice if Slashdot editors can be bothered to spell his name correctly. Many posts so far express some surprise that journals even accept anything other than Latex. Having been through the system several times, I can say that the reason that big journals like Science and Nature accept MS docs as the default format is because of biologists. Essentially, Latex is used only in Mathematics and Physics related sciences. Unlike them, most biologists don't know much about computers, and couldn't really give a rat's arse about the formats. Having trained in Physics (Bachelor) and Med/Bio (PhD) and now working in bioinformatics, I have had many arguments with people about this particular issue. My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files. I've bitched many times to my old boss that he was spending a few thousand dollars on getting Photoshop licenses just to crop some pictures or change the levels. Although the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback, but even then, just a couple licenses would have been sufficient for that purpose, rather than getting a license for every machine. I mean, these guys were using Photoshop as an image _viewer_! The situation in Physics is quite diffferent. Of course there are many hardcore OSS users, but many people just used BSD/Linux/(and even some old Unix machines are still chugging along), simply because they are free and they are sometimes also the best tools for the job. I remember in a few years ago working with an Astrophysics group during a summer vacation, and we had some time on the Parkes telescope, and we were able to remotely control the telescope from Sydney, which would have been impossible under MS Windows (at the time). Back to the point, ODF would hopefully bridge this difference, since if the biological scientists want to learn Latex, a WYSIWYG editor using ODF (such as OpenOffice.org) should be acceptable to them.
The difference is that people writing in those papres, id est Physicist and Mathematicians, are very well versed in informatics. Most of them have at least some basic knowledge of Unices, and at least do program in Mathlab and a little bit in Fortran.
They can understand what TeX is, and given the quantity of formulae they have to work with, they understand the advantages that TeX has to offer regarding them.
Nature is much more about life science. In those field you can find scientist which are way much more dexterous in manipulating micropipettes than computers. Most of them see computers as things that just have to work. They fire it up and use the mail client (Outlook express. Thunderbird is you have luck), browse a little bit (Internet Explorer or Firefox depending on the university) to find papres that they won't read on screen anyway but print on paper, and write with a word processor (i.e.: Word). They only time they write with anything else is... when they fire up PowerPoint to prepare a poster (Yes. There are tons of people abusing Powerpoint to do posters instead of using a proper publishing tools).
The couple of them who feel enlightened and feel the urge to be different than the mass of sheeps, they buy Macs and install "Microsoft Office for Mac" on them.
Most of them don't realise that there other thing besides Word to handle text documents. And they all feel too much accustomed to Word to switch to anything else. They are the people who are upset when universities try to push for OpenOffice.org, because, they say, University should prepare their student to be proficient with tools that they will encounter later in professional life, and Word is what those student will find (as if being proficient with word processing in general was much different than learning Word down to the button position and being completely lost each time microsoft decides to change the layout for each new generation).
Want a worse example ? Medical doctors (I'm one). Some of the fellow doctors I've seen still do all their document formatting using space bar. There are highly considered specialists with a long list of publication that smash repeatedly on the space bar until things seem grossly aligned on screen. And then don't understand while the document doesn't come the same when they print it. Or open it in another version of Word.
Those are the mythical "80%" people that only use "20%" of the feature of an office suite. Not a different set of "20%" than anyone else. The basic "20%" that form the common ground of any office suite. The "20%" of features that Word shares with Notepad.
They have no concept of "styles" or flagging "titles" (they probably imagine an "index" is something you write tediously by hand. Usually they transmit that job to interns. Who go though the document painfully fixing the format so the "index" function works as intended).
And you want them to switch to TeX when submitting papers to Life-Science journal ? They will just faint at the idea of launching something that doesn't look exactly like what they are used to on screen, and will have a hard time to find out which is the new icon to click to save.
And don't let me start about the level of maths and statistics we learn in medical school (near to absolute zero). Most of us hire a statistician whenever some button on a calculator need to be pressed. There's no such thing as a need for a better formula-writing environment.
Thankfully the arrival of bioinformatics, medical informatics, medical imaging and such computer intensive speciality in the field of life science will bring a little bit more computer litteracy. (Thankfully for me that are fields that I'm studying too, so there's plenty of job opportuni
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The legal profession used to one of the last holdouts for WordPerfect, because it allowed the decade-old files to be read in the latest version. How are you going to handle a 8- or 9-year-old deposition saved in Word 2005 format in 2013? Are you at least converting them to PDF?
Everyone who says that Word is an acceptable archive format for documents is a complete (fully trained) idiot.
I picked up a resume written in WP 4, on an Amiga, and imported it trivially (it did ask if I knew the format was WP 4) into WP 8 on X86 Linux.
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.
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."); }
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.
Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal? You are all advocating LaTeX but the truth is many journals will not accept anything other than a single column .doc file that they can copy and paste into their fancy typesetting software. A LaTeX file is useless to them as they use none of its typesetting features. I tried it once and got turned down because they wanted the .doc version pain in the ass but I learned my lesson.
Office 2007 user here. This is not a big deal, I have already set 2003 as my default "save as" to accommodate the slow change. I will also add that there are free conversion tools available. It's not as if we are etching the words into stone where they will remain that way forever lol...
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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What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?
They did "fix" the equation editor. The result is the new one that Office 2007 uses by default.
The original one was a third-party package Microsoft bought and put into Word, and could be somewhat daunting. The new one is simpler and built into the ribbon, but really only useful for one-line formulas.
Something everyone's missing, though: THE ORIGINAL EQUATION EDITOR IS STILL IN OFFICE 2007!. Put in your "Microsoft Equation" object the same way you always have - insert->object.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.