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Do OpenOffice Users Save In Microsoft Format?
superglaze writes "Looking through an article on the smartphone office suite Quickoffice, I noted a claim by a company executive that OpenOffice users usually save their documents in a Microsoft format, e.g. .doc. Hence the company has no plans to support .odf. I guess I can see the rationale for this — it helps if you're sending a document to an MS-using company — but what's this community's general experience of saving in .odf vs. .doc format?"
I save my items internally in ODF format, but if I have to send something to another person without OO.o, I need to save it in .doc format. Honestly, if someone could convince the world that ODF is an acceptable format, I'd love to save the step.
I stick to OOo's default format no matter what.
.doc and call the shots, I return it as an ODF and tell them to get openoffice.org. I've made numerous switchers that way, all but one of whom thanked me for it.
If I'm in the position of being able to return a
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
'.doc' is a whole shitload of different formats, some very differentm some only a little different. However, it is because of the differences that sales for new versions of MS Office are driven. If the old programs could read the new formats, then we wouldn't have that problem. Why else do you think that MS Offfice 2007 munges your old files?
If MS published the specs for the old binary formats, we wouldn't ahve that problem either. Or if MS Office supported an open format like OpenDocument we wouldn't have that problem.
The way off the treadmill is openformats even for MS Office.
My users at least are lazy. They'll just save it in whatever format the software defaults to. They don't know or care about different document formats, they just know they "do this to open a document", "do that to save it", etc. Windows explorer defaults to hiding document extensions, so why should they even bother learning? Default it to save to MS office format and you'll save headaches since it will "just work" when they email it to someone.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
I save all of my files in ODF/ODT, and if I need to submit them to just about anyone else I have to convert them to an MS-Office (.doc, .xls, etc...) format. I do the same with audio files, image files, etc, using open file formats instead of their closed/proprietary/patent-encumbered brethren.
The problem is that people's computers aren't coming pre-installed with software that can read our "primary" Open File Formats. Heck -- even when I send my Macintosh-toting friends Ogg Vorbis files, they don't have any idea how to open them, so eventually I get enough complaints and just re-encode in mp3 format (and feel bad about trying and failing at spreading the Good Word).
Perhaps the best thing that us geeks could do to support open file formats is to develop a little "Unknown File Format" system utility for all of the current flavors of Windows and OSX. The utility would sit in the background and would pop up a little note whenever the user tried to open a file of an unrecognized type, telling the user that the file was, say, an XCF image file created by The GIMP, and offering to download an appropriate program to either view or edit the file.
If we had such a tool, we could feel much better about sending out open file formats like Ogg Vorbis, knowing that even clueless users would only be a click away from opening our files.
coding is life
I actually got an advantage once because I didn't have Word. A company sent me a contract for moving in .doc format. I did my best with WordPad which was the closest thing I had available, but it ended up mangled. I sent it filled-out to the best of my ability, with a comment that I couldn't easily deal with it and I wasn't sure if it was usable.
Well, they ended up delaying my moving significantly and then asking me for some extra fees that I'd never known about. I objected, and they said this information was all in the doc file I'd signed.
"Oh, the one I could barely read? It wasn't shown in the version I saw, because I couldn't read much. I sent you what WordPad did with it - what I signed was that."
Turned out that a lot of the major clauses were missing in that version due to WordPad's crummy handling - but since I'd signed it, and they'd accepted it (I presume without looking at it, otherwise they would have seen how mangled it was), they had technically agreed to the modified version which didn't have any of those fees at all.
I was tired of dealing with them by then anyway, so I told them to either deliver my stuff at the price that I'd agreed to or send it back to the place they'd picked it up from and refund my money, as I'd certainly never agreed to give them more than they had already received. They delivered it in two days.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The student was fully correct to 1) try to negotiate with the teach and 2) when that failed, switch to a more competent one. If the teacher is *requiring* a format that can be used by only one application on only one platform (both of which are expensive to acquire, operate and maintain) then they have too much ignorance or too much of an axe to grind to be allowed to continue teaching. To add to the damage, that application munges older files in older formats
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.