Slashdot Mirror
Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester
An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."
Google took a page right out of Microsoft's playbook by buying a company who was already working on web based doc writers, effectively beating Microsoft to the game.
Personally I wouldn't trust important documents to stay on the web server. What happens when google goes belly up and starts shutting down their web servers? The bigger a company gets, the bigger they fall.
There are collaborative real-time editors such as Gobby. Together with an audio-chat this is a great tool for collaboration.
I am against huge monopolies controlling everything we do on our computers with their close sourced spy crapware. Down with the G$$G-borg! Fight for Microsoft! Up with freedom!
Microsoft Word is an amazingly innovative and capable program. It does everything I need with an intuitive interface that even your grandmother could use, but is l33t enough for the geekiest power user. Plus, it's free! All power to Microsoft, fight the evil corporate empires!!!!
MS has had online capability for years now where multiple people can open and edit documents at the same time. It was just over the corporate network.
I'd like to confirm that the internet has not changed the way I write word documents. It's still a mouse and keyboard for me. I don't tend to share documents that much - I email them and that's that. I'd imagine this is true of most Word users, or at least, most Word documents.
analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using [insert-any-application-here] because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option
What an amazing insight! Who would have suspected such a thing?
which is totally what she said
I always feel I am fighting it to get it to do what I want. If I wanted to fight computers, I would buy computer games.
What's the point of this post? I'm simply saying the article speaks the truth.
Any company has a large number of existing documents. To switch to a different file-incompatible program would be silly; the cost of converting would far exceed any possible savings, not to mention the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously.
If OpenOffice/etc. are guaranteed 100% compatible with Word documents, they aren't promoting that fact very well. If they aren't compatible, they're not serious competition.
Where did you see that in the manifesto? I suspect you are in for a big disappointment.
The problem with Word competitors is that they are all pretty much carbon copies of Word. So there really isn't much to be gained from switching It costs a minimum of $50,000 with overheads to employ a white collar worker. $250 for a three year bulk license for Office is a rounding error.
Every one of the competing clones has the same broken idea that spreadheets, documents and databases are different things to be joined together by clumsy notions like COM.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The first time the file serving cloud takes a nosedive, everyone will scream and run away.
Sure, Microsoft already eats files on a regular basis, but not in a coordinated mini-apocalypse.
And yes, Google Docs could do(has done) that too, but people aren't yet using it on the same scale. (Plus it is in beta, ha-ha, not their fault)
Same thing in education too. I tried SO hard to move people from Microsoft Office to Open Office, but even though it worked fine with office docs, in the end people felt comfortable with MS Office. The only way that would change is through a policy change and when your administration doesnt care about what they spend money on and whats better, why the hell would they sign off on such a change.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
"The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option.""
There's two other things as well. How well MS products integrate with each other and all the third-party software written for MS software.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The company for which I work used MS Word for document production for years. Then MS swooped in, told us we were violating the licenses we owned and told us to pony up a ton of dough. We changed to Open Office.
That said, OO doesn't meet our needs as well, and has some memory issues (20000 PDF conversions later, it crashes). Since it is open source it is harder for us to get timely issue resolution. Currently we are stuck on OO 2.1, as "improvements" in 2.3 exacerbated the issue, and 3.0 doesn't appear to support our interface at all.
So, yeah, down with MS and all that, but there product isn't that bad.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
On the whole subject of collaborative document editing, I think this is the real kicker. Many companies block Google's tools since that would mean storing company info outside of the company. Add to this the "beta" caveat that Google carries, and Google no longer considers itself liable if competitors get access to the info. After all, they did tell you it was buggy and all...
Are we really moving back to a server/terminal mentality? More importantly, is it a good thing that we are adding traffic to do tasks that were done with local media? I think corporations like the idea of collaborative editing, but they would prefer it of everything stayed behind their firewalls and on their own server's drives.
Any company has a large number of existing documents. To switch to a different file-incompatible program would be silly; the cost of converting would far exceed any possible savings, not to mention the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously.
Your existing office suite isn't going to magically stop working.
And the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously is one you pay every few years with Office *anyway*.
Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Well yeah...
How much do these people charge to provide such pearls of wisdom? And who'se paying?
Pete Boyd
Go ahead, mod me offtopic, but somebody has to do it. http://begthequestion.info/
My company (large IT firm) blocks the use of google docs from anywhere within the corporate network. Just attempting to navigate to google docs generates a warning page about accessing a site that contravenes corporate policy, and that repeated "violations" will be logged and reported to management. Many's the time it would have been much more convenient to perform some collaborative task in google docs rather than routing a DOC all over the goddamned place via email attachment ... but it is not to be.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Should have been:
"From the no shit! dept."
--from the Grow A Pair dept.
How hard can it be to switch? This post will neither debate the advantages or disadvantages of word or wordprocessors. Just the latter... of users.
Having recently had to interact with the "real world" and wordprocessor documents, I must say that I was astounded at the quality of output of wordprocessors. The main problem is that even technically capable people seem to refuse outright to make any effort to actually learn how to use a tool that they spend hours per day sitting in front of. They treat a wordprocessor as a typewriter with font effects and images.
People still can't embed images properly. Either they're linked to some program which noone else has or a bitmap of a vector drawing so noone else can edit them. People still refuse to make even the most basic use of styles or cross referencing. It is absolutely astounding.
People will happily put in HOURS per document on a daily basis, fiddlind around with font dialogs, instead of spending 1 our learning how to use styles, for instance.
How hard can it be to switch? Users would go from not knowing how to use word to not knowing how to use openoffice.
But it really does amaze me how people can use the same tool all day, every day for weeks at a time, or even more and still not know many of the most basic features. Sure people want to "get work done", but that is best achieved by becoming an expert in the tools of the trade. When was the last time you heard a carpenter refusing to learn how to use a power saw because he "needed to get work done"?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We will not be going on net for document creation... Get your heads out of the clouds and back to ground. The mere thought of being reliant on resources out of our control is insanity. The Bandwidth issue not withstanding, security and infrastructure concerns aside, this is folly and is meant to drive another INTERNET bubble of fools looking for the next big tech movement. Let's start talking about how better to organize what we have instead of watching repeats of William Shatner's Techwar ok ? Cripes.
End of Line.
A lot of things are done "out of habit", but if it is something that people want, let it be. is it so hard to understand that people may really **like** something even if there is some habit in this behavior? Or maybe it's just wishful thinking from the author side....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I hope you reported your problems. At least with OOo bug reports can actually be useful.
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Made from the freshest electrons.
It costs a minimum of $50,000 with overheads to employ a white collar worker. $250 for a three year bulk license for Office is a rounding error.
I think you need to stop using 8-bit floating point numbers.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
This is timely in that I just had a 'run-in' of sorts regarding MS Word usage and its consideration as a standard. My son is in sixth grade and, of course, has to write about 2 papers a month in his English class. He had his first official type-written paper this past couple of weeks and since we have no Windows computers and no MS Office/Word at home (all Linux, Solaris and Mac OS), we could not comply with the teacher's requirement for using MS Word with a Times New Roman font. Instead I had my son use Google Documents (which is what he's used since he started typing papers of any sort) with a Verdana font. He ended up receiving a D on the paper for not following instructions. The school has a computer lab, with Windows and MS Office, but that lab is only available to him during his assigned lab hours or after school. If he wants to use it after school, I have to pay for "After School Care" program. This kind of nonsense infuriates me. It's as if he can only write a reasonable paper if done so using MS products. Anyway, I just wrote the teacher last evening regarding coming to an agreement on things so that he doesn't suffer due to the school's devotion to MS products (a recent change as the entire school used to be Linux/OOo/etc.).
Although this might seem an unfair blow, trying to replace Word is probably considerably less important than trying to replace Excel. In finance, for example, everyone uses Excel out of habit (and due to a lack of a good replacement, too), but in many cases because replacements do not support the add-ons they are used to (e.g. Bloomberg add-ons), without which many would be useless.
This is the exact same type of hurdle that Linux faces with support for hardware. Companies don't want to support it, and it's taken a really long time to write drivers. If Excel is replaced with a good alternative, I think Word would easily follow, even if the interface were radically different.
Just a thought
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Pull numbers out of your ass much?
We have posted a couple bug reports.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Putting a "beta" label on a product doesn't, by itself, relieve you of legal liability. That language goes in the terms of use that no one ever reads. In the end, your liability is whatever the courts say it is when you are sued.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
And when did it's interface become intuitive?
When they replaced the ribbon with a nipple.
What makes the pointing stick on a ThinkPad any more intuitive than any other way to choose an item from a GUI menu? And why would it require replacing a tabbed toolbar?
Mandating use of Word or any other commercial product for homework seems to me a form of economic discrimination. Lots of families still can't afford a PC, much less Office.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Every one of the competing clones has the same broken idea that spreadheets, documents and databases are different things
A spreadsheet is a reactive program with its expressions in a cell grid. A document is a tree containing text and markup. A database is a set of relations with constraints on them. What do you consider "broken" about the differences between these data types?
I have a perpetual issue with customers using Word to type in plain text data for me to import. I mean, I'll ask for a simple list of words, e.g. a category list for a web site, and I'll get a Word doc with the items inside. So I have to fire up openoffice just to get at the text.
I know, it sounds minor, but it really is a pain in the ass when I should be able to copy them straight out of the email. It at least doubles the time I spend on a simple task.
Education is the key, but it's an arduous process.
Do you have ESP?
I think that not only is the issue with the servers crashing or being compromised in some other way, but what to do when you have problems with your internet connection? Slow or flaky or just insecure, any of these scenarios disable you completely if you don't have a local copy of the file and a local editing software.
I think word probably is still the best for most. OpenOffice lacks many of its features and useability. I have used both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office and always end up going back to Microsoft Office. With OpenOffice there are all sorts of little annoyances that start to add up quickly that make it quite unuseable, for instance it would only let me drag position floating boxes and items in a document by increments of roughly twenty pixels. It doesnt have an off document scratch area in the space surrounding the document, etc. There is nothing in OpenOffice that can do what Word or Publisher does.
I also think web applications are horrid and would never use them. I dont even use web e-mail. The reason is it is slow, clumsy, if you lose your internet connection you cant work. Plus you have everything you are doing sent to a server so there is no privacy. No thanks.
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems. Let state and local governments figure out the cheapest way to implement such a standard. Really, it is irrelevant whether or not the government uses a free software operating system, as long as government documents are not in a proprietary format and as long as the government is not wasting money paying for its software (proprietary or free). What is needed is easier communication between different government departments and between the government and the people; the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
Palm trees and 8
Most conversation is nowadays done per email, and most docs are generated.
When do you really need a printout of a document which is not actually generated or written in DocBook or another format resp. not sent per email?
Maybe some contract or FAX, but it's not that commonly used as it was a decade ago where we wrote virtually everything using a Wordprocessor.
"That said, OO doesn't meet our needs as well, and has some memory issues (20000 PDF conversions later, it crashes)."
That is a HUGE number of conversions to be doing with a GUI based program. I do not know what your workflow is, but it sounds like you really need to be invoking ghostscript through some sort of shell script, or maybe in a Perl or AWK program. It is possible that you will actually see efficiency improvements, as this approach may allow for greater automation. As I said, I do not know your workflow, but this really sounds like a case where a little bit of shell scripting can go a long way.
Palm trees and 8
Here's a video explanation of why you shouldn't e-mail documents. I completely agree with it. Creating twenty-five copies of the same document at various revisions is an error-prone habit.
That's a problem for a distributed version control system such as git. Using a real-time collaboration tool such as Google Docs could increase costs by $700 per person per year, as people outside the office would need to use 3G data plans to view and edit the document online instead of updating at the next Wi-Fi hotspot.
Same here. I recently had a potential employer send me an *important* document in the new Word 2007 docx format. I happened to have an older copy of Word 2003 that was unable to open it. I had to search for and install an addon that allowed older copies of Office (back to 2000) read the new format, maybe write it, I'm not sure. I know OpenOffice 2.4 couldn't open it, though I see they're out with version 3 now, and hadn't tried it. I finally manage to open the document, and what was inside?
Plain text. It had a title at the top that was underlined and centered, and the whole thing was in MS Comic Sans, but that's still plain text. There was no reason not to save it as an .rtf file, an older .doc file, or even just copy and paste into an email. But Word was used because it was there.
Also, I've seen lots of office workers exchange pictures via pasting them in Word and emailing the doc files to each other, instead of learning that pictures can also be saved as files.
I think that if anything will break users from their MS Office habits, the ribbon UI will. I found it very non-intuitive for a long time (10+ years) Office user. Frustrated with trying to get a hnadle on the UI, I finally switched over to OpenOffice and while it's *not quite* as feature rich as my old pre-ribbon MS Office, it's got a sufficiently similar UI that adapting took virtually no time at all.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
What you're saying is that ANYthing else is better than Excel, but that there is no better replacement?
So tell me this, oh genius AC... if there is no better replacement how do you expect people to use said non-existing better replacement?
Sounds a lot like you're criticizing Excel just to criticize Excel and MS. Pretty weak, actually.
There are certainly valid criticisms of Office, but that sure as hell wasn't one of 'em.
As far as a basic work processor, yes there are many others but as far as Word not being the best option for businesses and they are using it just becasue, I have to disagree. For businesses that only use basic options, maybe. But there is not many that come close when it comes to things like complex mail mergings (Google can't do), integrating with VoIP systems for business contact integration. Tying to journaling in Outlook so you can see what contacts each document has been used with, etc. There are a lot of things besides cut and paste that businesses use that other systems don't offer...yet. Its not just because we are "stuck" and "don't know what is out there".
Good luck with that, but don't wait for a fix
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Your existing office suite isn't going to magically stop working.
It will once the activation server goes down. See all the problems with broken "purchased" tracks from DRM music stores. It also will once new copies of the non-free operating system for which the existing office suite was designed are no longer available, or when newly purchased hardware no longer comes with drivers for the operating system for which the existing office suite was designed.
And the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously is one you pay every few years with Office *anyway*.
But at least Access 2007 can run Access+VBA applications designed for previous versions of Access. OpenOffice.org Base cannot, as far as I know. This would make the retail management software package that my employer uses stop working.
Dunno about anyone else, but I think the latest MS interface junk in Office is a horrible abortion. I think/thought it was a great opportunity for competitors to step in to get experienced Office users to give them a try. Can OO.o v3 close the deal?
(a OO.o 'skin' that emulated the shortcuts and menu structure of Office 2000 would be helpful in this regard..)
It is maddening to get e-mails with a Word document attached that is just text. I've never understood why that can't just be put in the e-mail. Or when I get something as a document that I'm not editing or to edit, why not a PDF.
Don't even start me on the image thing.
Are you serious, if anyone has updated ms office to 2007, its totally different. How could anyone be familiar with it. I use openoffice to make diagrams now because word is now a pain in the butt.
The thinking of them as data types. It is all data to the people who need access to it. It should all be treated the same way and easily accessible however you want. From what I've seen, we're not there yet. I feel the separation of the data into spreadsheet/webpage/document/etc is keeping us in the dark ages of computing. When web browsers went to style sheets that separated data from layout was a good day indeed. Now we need the same for other uses of data.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
15 days ago, on this website:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230
Yes, you can mark me as troll or flamebait but you know as well as I do that OO will not survive 2009.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Microsoft could maintain their advantage with Word/Office if they released an open source toolset for providing self/private-hosted online groupware which integrates with the Office suite.
It could be a subset of Sharepoint which allows the users to edit in Word, but save to an online managed repository with versioning, permissions and group editing tools (ie: limited workflows).
They don't need to provide the extensive framework that Sharepoint provides to enterprise customers... just the basics needed by an average office pool.
Make it open source with an API so other word processing docs can also work with it to avoid any embrace and extend issues, and have it store documents in the ODF so it is fully cross-platform, etc.
Then MS can use their leadership in the market and their customer support contracts to keep selling the Office Suite which is their number one software. Other's will try to compete and may get a few niche markets if they can create custom office apps for industry or extend the online API for specific workflows... (if they can compete with the full Sharepoint stack) but MS will dominate and for very good reason. At the same time, they will provide for future proofing and be a good software citizen which interoperates with all other options.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Given OOo's track record at bugfixing, I wouldn't call that "useful" for the purposes of a company that wants to choose an office suite.
Chances are, buying MS Office is cheaper. This is the hard truth.
----
And fuck you stupid Slashdot, how long do I have to wait before hitting Reply after entering a comment this short?
I feel the separation of the data into spreadsheet/webpage/document/etc is keeping us in the dark ages of computing.
I agree that the data types "human-readable document" and "human-readable web page" are similar enough that one can be generated from the other. But a spreadsheet is an executable program, and a database is a set of relations with constraints. How would one represent those in a human-readable document or vice versa? Trying to combine executable programs with data is what got us into the whole macro virus mess, so it's not to be taken lightly.
Since it is open source it is harder for us to get timely issue resolution.
What kind of timeliness in issue resolution were you getting from MS?
The licensing costs of Excel are simply not an issue in financial companies (a vanishing fraction of what it costs to keep the desk operating); also, we don't use any of the fancier functionality of Excel - any fancy stuff traders need, such as solvers, option pricers, etc is written in C++ and made available as an Excel plugin. So Excel is merely used as a GUI framework with mild number-crunching support, and it's really great for that. Switching would simply mean redoing all of the C++-to-plugin code, for no benefit that I can see.
Nobody in finance uses Excel for research - it's all Matlab or R, with some C++ thrown in.
Can you give me a single reason *why* finance folks (of which I am one) should switch away from Excel?
>Only because they use Excel and don't use anything else.
I like the OpenOffice spreadsheet but I greatly prefer Excel's scatter plot.
Also, recognize Excel as a development platform and realize how much software is targeted for that platform in finance and in the natural sciences. In some areas, Word is just an artifact, a consequence of choosing Excel.
I am not saying Excel is perfect (and I'm much more into Matlab), but I don't know where you get the idea that "anything" would be better. Excel is a pretty solid program, and so is Word.
Have you actually talked to many accountants who use Excel extensively, or do you just hate Microsoft on general principles?
You didn't mention it but others did, the idea that Word is mostly features that people don't bother to use. I think you'd be surprised by this also, if you looked at people who use it professionally in certain fields (especially legal secretaries.) I once thought that "nobody" used the advanced and esoteric features of the word processors, but I've seen this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
That's a much better habit.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
User I dream about smoking writes
Thank you, but I don't need to know about that aspect of your sex life or drug habit as the case may be.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Word is mostly used for churning out throwaway documents. Excel is used for long term storage of data - and there's a _lot_ of VBA code out there pulling data out of ancient spreadsheets.
My Journal
Ah, so can your ANYTHING_ELSE do a quick join on two rectangular areas in the spreadsheet, and dump the result into the spreadsheet?
How good is ANYTHING_ELSE's pivot table support?
And no, I don't want to have to mess around with a full relational DB to get the above done when it's just a couple of clicks in Excel.
Familiarity to users and legacy investments are definitely things to consider when trying to decide your best option, aren't they?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
On our intranet, e.g, there is a web page on "Instructions how to setup a certain version control software". Step 1 is a link that throws a setup_procedure.doc at you, which in turn needs to be opened locally in MS Word to read further instructions.
Given OOo's track record at bugfixing, I wouldn't call that "useful" for the purposes of a company that wants to choose an office suite.
Not that I'm really familiar with Microsoft's track record in this particular matter but I don't see why it would be particularly better. Their purpose is to add features and not fix bugs as they used to say themselves.
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Made from the freshest electrons.
And early next year, someone will post a comment on Slashdot claiming Google copied the idea from Microsoft.
And get modded informative.
This space intentionally left blank.
Hi -I'm going to critique the article itself:
It's flimsy, light, and 'trendy' - not exactly the result of hard-core study. Not too many concrete reasons are given as to why online collaboration tools are *better* or fill specific business needs compared to word.
Despite its warts, Word *works* and people generally know how to use it. It's tested, it's a known entity, businesses know how much it costs, etc. They're not ready to experiment yet.
Obviously online services have a totally different set of pros & cons, but this article doesn't really seem to address those.
Even if online suites were clearly better suited to business than locally installed software, *this* article does not make a suitable case for switching.
My concern is C-level execs who see this kind of stuff and make sweeping decisions for their company based on a trendy 'puff' piece like this.
I would advise them to go ask Gartner or someone who actually knows how to research this stuff. :)
I have a perpetual issue with customers using Word to type in plain text
Worse, I've had 'technical' people take my 'txt' formatted documentation and paste them badly into Word, as it's more 'professional'.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Sounds like it is pretty core to the company. If that is so it is probably worth paying a developer to fix the issues that you need fixed. Even something on rent-a-coder, the cost of the developer will no doubt be cheaper then the MS office license price and you get to be in control.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
I definitely agree with this. People get so wrapped up in the question as to whether the source code is free/open (which admittedly can be an important issue) that they forget about the issue of "standards". If you use open standards and open protocols, then it gives everyone the freedom to use whatever software they want without fear of vendor lock-in. Even if some particular person or group is using software that's completely proprietary and secretive about its inner-workings, you'll still be able to communicate, interoperate, and share information.
At the very least, I agree with attempts to ensure that all government documents are disseminated in open formats. Insofar as the government distributes word documents, they're reenforcing a Microsoft monopoly, and I don't believe that is appropriate. The definition of what is "open" shouldn't just be "some body certified it as such," but rather the law should have specific conditions, including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
Oh, definitely, if you're doing a presentation-type thing, where picture size and placement is important, by all means use a word processor, or even a PowerPoint-like thing if you know the receiving party can view it. Even a PDF would be good.
A quick paste and save of a lolcat is another matter entirely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Doesn't Open Office support .doc files and Times New Roman font?
Indeed, it does. Open Office's ".doc" support was miserable in OO 1.0, almost OK in OO 2.0 (certainly good enough for a student paper), and has been cleaned up a bit more in OO 3.0, now that the spec for ".doc" files is available.
Can't speak for Google Docs. The browser font situation still sucks, ten years on.
Here you go:
http://www.addintools.com/
That will replace the bewildering ribbon with a proper menu, the way Dog intended it it to be.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I guess they are equally bad in practice, albeit for different reasons.
Also, I've seen lots of office workers exchange pictures via pasting them in Word and emailing the doc files to each other, instead of learning that pictures can also be saved as files.
Sigh. Got a Word doc from a missionary friend that I support over Christmas. Opened it up and it was a picture of him and the family - no text or anything else.
Do you have ESP?
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems.
That's a great start. The problem is that Microsoft will simply subvert the standards process to its own ends and become the de facto standard. They've done it before.
Microsoft only likes standards when it can define the standard.
Other than that, I would highly support the concept.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I say this because of a horror story my mother recently related to me, and it makes a good example for why people use these under-performing Windows applications: her work is still using IE 5 because only it is compatible with the software they have to use in order to run their business. Did you hear that? I'm not kidding. They are forced to use INTERNET EXPLORER FIVE. This almost makes me cry every time I think about it.
It appears to me that nobody specifically 'cares' about spreadsheets. They only care about what the spreadsheet tells them about the data that is entered.
In that case, a "document" is the output of the spreadsheet or database. Specifically, the fact that a spreadsheet or database even lets the user enter data makes it different from a document.
I fail to see how you are going to unify the thinking about things that are inherently different. On the filesystem level, all things are just files with data, it's the different representations of this data that makes it useful. Now, I can buy the idea of some kind of abstraction framework that allows you to hook up different formats to do queries and such, but there are some very hard problems in there, that have been solved in different ways.
For instance, let's say three people have used different software to build the list of people coming to their party, with contact details and some notes. One has used Word and just laid out everything so that it "looks right", using spaces and tabs. Much of the semantic linking between items is now totally in the human's mind and not captured in the data at all. The second has used Excel, but has used a different sheet for every person. The third has used Access and has built a nice view to see the list. Given that there are users that will naturally gravitate to each of these approaches, how can you provide a unified method to access the list? Heck, I've seen some approaches that I couldn't understand until the person explained what they were trying to do, and my pattern recognition and contextual systems are a lot more advanced than the projected AI for the next couple of years.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
DocX? The one and only Open XML.
Have you tried Adobe buzzword? It is beta quality software but features real innovation and a better user experience.
You have to ask for preferential treatment of open source in public procurement policies and linux migration and you will get open standard support and discounts offered for free by the Microsoft lobby. Right now governments push for open standards and Microsoft redefines open standards as patent-encumbered. Better aim higher.
Microsoft will escalate and burn when you come up with these proposals but the fuzz they make to combat your policies would trigger a domino effect. So they have to compromise.
Right now governments push for open standards and Microsoft redefines open standards as patent-encumbered. Better aim higher.
That's why I said:
including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
The governmental definition of an "open standard" should, by law, include that anyone can implement it for free, legally, for any purpose. If that doesn't mean leaving out patented techniques or surrendering related patented techniques, then there should be an official procedure whereby they provide a blanket license to anyone using their patents in the implementation of that standard.
If Microsoft tries to backdoor some other restrictions that prevent people from using things freely, then you have to adjust the law.
Ultimately you could complain about the same thing with the government pushing open source-- Microsoft might screw with the definition of "open source", meeting the official definition but otherwise being useless. But that's how it goes with any laws. If you're not careful in how you write it, it'll get abused.