I am struggling to complete my thesis right now, in Writer/Calc/Graph of course, and there is one key functionality that is limited to the point of being crippled. Search. While it should theoretically support RegEx syntax, in fact it is far more limited than Word's. You can't even search for manual line breaks, multi-line patterns or formatting like hidden text. This has been much whined about on OOo forums and reportedly some work is being devoted there, but at the moment it IS a royal pain.
An easy solution to that is to mount the swap partition/file on boot using encryption with a randomly-generated password. This is trivial in Linux, don't know about Windoze, though...
Isn't it? It is one thing for the administrator to be able to access anything; it is another for him to be able to do it under the name of another user.
In traditional Windows environment, an admin can access pretty much anything, but usually he has to set himself as the owner first. Since one cannot give a file back once it is taken, an administrator cannot for example set someone up acting on his behalf or access people's personal files unnoticed. I think this is better than the god-like root model...
Using subsequent M$ Word versions as an example: You can use Word2k features in a document, save it as.doc and then open it in e.g. Word97. The document opens and you get all the formatting EXCEPT for the Word2k-introduced features. That means, the text will look OK, but the 'animated text' effect won't be there. (Pretty similar to HTML parsers ignoring unknown markup, I think...)
It gets ugly, however, with complex formatting like tables with funnily merged cells or complex paragraph numering schemes - older versions are then likely to render the document unreadable.
Technical details of formatting used e.g. in pre-DTP text processing are yet another matter. For example, subsequent Word versions do not encode font colors in the same fashion - there was a transition from color names to RGB somewhere. The result: the colors read from the document may slightly vary from one Word version to another.
My overall opinion: this backward-compatibility works well for simple cases. If you use M$ Office for anything more sophisticated, you must have several versions installed side-by-side.
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I am struggling to complete my thesis right now, in Writer/Calc/Graph of course, and there is one key functionality that is limited to the point of being crippled. Search. While it should theoretically support RegEx syntax, in fact it is far more limited than Word's. You can't even search for manual line breaks, multi-line patterns or formatting like hidden text. This has been much whined about on OOo forums and reportedly some work is being devoted there, but at the moment it IS a royal pain.
An easy solution to that is to mount the swap partition/file on boot using encryption with a randomly-generated password. This is trivial in Linux, don't know about Windoze, though...
Isn't it? It is one thing for the administrator to be able to access anything; it is another for him to be able to do it under the name of another user. In traditional Windows environment, an admin can access pretty much anything, but usually he has to set himself as the owner first. Since one cannot give a file back once it is taken, an administrator cannot for example set someone up acting on his behalf or access people's personal files unnoticed. I think this is better than the god-like root model...
Using subsequent M$ Word versions as an example: You can use Word2k features in a document, save it as .doc and then open it in e.g. Word97. The document opens and you get all the formatting EXCEPT for the Word2k-introduced features. That means, the text will look OK, but the 'animated text' effect won't be there. (Pretty similar to HTML parsers ignoring unknown markup, I think...)
It gets ugly, however, with complex formatting like tables with funnily merged cells or complex paragraph numering schemes - older versions are then likely to render the document unreadable.
Technical details of formatting used e.g. in pre-DTP text processing are yet another matter. For example, subsequent Word versions do not encode font colors in the same fashion - there was a transition from color names to RGB somewhere. The result: the colors read from the document may slightly vary from one Word version to another.
My overall opinion: this backward-compatibility works well for simple cases. If you use M$ Office for anything more sophisticated, you must have several versions installed side-by-side.