In my "day job", I work for a Fortune 100 company (which forbids me
even mentioning it... sigh), and they are thoroughly dependent on the
MS office suite, MS win desktops. Those are part of their "corporate
standard." OTOH, I use linux and solaris for "security exception"
reasons and have used staroffice/openoffice to handle the documents,
spreadsheets, presentions, etc. ad infinitum.
My company has several HUNDRED documents and spreadsheets written in
the "latest and greatest" release(s) of MS Word, Calc, etc., which
either cannot be opened at all in win98 and/or win2000 OR which when
opened are severely altered (text [a] missing altogether, or [b]
garbled, or [c] reformatted beyond reasonable usability) or "spoiled"
beyond use. All of them are large and/or large and extremely complex.
Currently I have used OOo/staroffice7 to open most of them successfully
and save them in the "Word 97/2000/xp (.doc)" format (for MSWord doc's)
or the "Microsoft Excel 97/2000/xp (.xls)" format (for spreadsheets).
I do not know about the carry-over of the macros - most of the time the
people were so happy to get their data back, that they never mentioned
whether their macros converted properly (sorry). I do not deal with
doing this for presentations, but the person who does so has told me
that he has seen a number (2 to 3 dozen, I believe) of presentations
which he has similarly converted so that people still using windows2000
could use them. (But I have no *direct* experience with this one, so
consider this a "hearsay" if you like.)
On my *direct* experience with MSWord, I routinely create very large
technical analysis documents which are typically 250-1000 pages long,
containing upwards of 100-200 tables, and 75-150 scatterplots built in
the spreadsheets. Back when I was using MSOffice (2000 - we never go
approval to use any later release), I had *SEVERAL* (at least 20 in 1.5
years) of these which I was successfully able to CREATE in MSWord but
which could NOT later be REOPENED in MSWord.
I switched to OOo two years ago (well, really StarOffice7, then OOo -
currently I am successfully using OOo 1.9.104), and have had TWO such
documents in OOo which on saving became corrupted and were not
successfully re-openable/re-usable.
So ...
Will companies "touch" OO.o? I know of several which already have,
sometimes even officially. While the debate continues, I find OOo
being used more and more "unofficially" (similar to the case where the
IT folks quietly swapped out NT boxen for Linux boxen running Samba to
be the servers for the windows systems and improved their reliability,
and nobody noticed a difference except in increased uptime).
I suspect that the "unofficial use" trend will continue until it
reaches a point that larger companies *have* to take official notice
and study the problem. (Not the case with the small companies I know -
some of them have already dumped MSOffice for OOo, others have not yet
decided.) Then the real fun will begin, depending on the
infrastructure and corporate culture of the company on a case-by-case
basis.
Hope this muddies the waters a little further.
william austin
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
