Re: My New OpenOffice.org tcolumn

Subject: Re: My New OpenOffice.org tcolumn
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 12:11:31 -0500


Mike O. wrote:

I'm a little tired of seeing OOo evaluated in terms of its compatibility
with Word. Word compatibility is nice to have, but that's not part of the
mission of OOo.

If you need Word for your job, buy a copy of Word. If you want to use OOo
but you still need to read Word files that people send you, get the free
Word viewer, or use your old copies of Word you have lying around (hint:
they work fine).



Mike,

Consider the opposite situation. Here's a real-world scenario:

My SO is a physician. Last night she counted up eight PCs that she owns,
either at home or the office (don't ask). She doesn't want to pay MS the
bucks for that many copies of MS Office, so she wants to use OOo.
However, she presents papers at conferences and submits papers to
journals, and the conference chairs and journal editors want to open the
files in Word or PowerPoint.

So she needs to have one copy of MS Office with which to check materials
she is sending out. Fine. But she wants to be able to do her writing
wherever she happens to be, in OOo.

Time spent fixing glitches (or errors that get through because she
doesn't notice the glitches) are a problem for her.

When she uses OOo to generate a PDF instead, other errors creep in, and
that's a problem, too.

The same situation can arise in any office that chooses to make the
switch to OOo and then wants to be able to share documents with other
companies, trade magazines, etc.

It isn't just whether the OOo user can open and read a Word doc; it's
whether an OOo doc exported in Word format actually works when opened in
Word.

Dick




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