I have heard from a few other people who had written me off-list about
the lack of a good filter to import Applix documents, spreadsheets,
etc. We have a large (>12k) of them of which several hundred are still
important to maintain.
This is just some info for other people who are in the same type of
situation.
Yesterday I finally discovered that the koffice suite can read (at
least many of) them - not perfectly but well enough to recover text,
data, and quite a bit of formatting apparently, although page headers
and footers appear to be lost.
Tables seem to be a big problem (they get translated with a line break
after each cell so if you have, for instance a 4x4 table it comes out
as 16 lines of text), but otherwise if you can no longer get applix to
run on your current system, then the koffice suite can apparently be
used to recover (some?) documents. (And I'm thinking about doing a
macro to convert these back to tables...)
The only other big problem so far is that footnotes seem to be hosed
somewhat, and I'll be looking at that later. (Important: Most of the
papers we're looking at have heavy footnoting.)
The version of koffice I have (1.3.5) also offered to save the docs in
oo-1.x format (.sxw), but these proved to be unreadable by both oo-1
and oo-1.9.113; however, several other formats were available and at
least and ".rtf" seems to be the best alternative at this point.
We may have to put up a machine running rh8.0 to reinstall applix and
recover docs (but that takes time, resourse$$, and an older machine
which we don't currently have), so this discovery is useful at the
office - and I hope it helps some other folks on this list as well who
have converted from applix to OOo.
--
William W. Austin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Life is just another phase I'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
