Neil D. McAliece wrote:
I would dearly love to migrate our users to OO 2. It would be a major step
towards getting XP off the bulk of our desktops. The major sticking point is
still document compatibility. Admitedly I need to have a look at the final
release, but it was definitely still a problem with the later betas.
A significant number of Word documents emailed to us would not display
correctly, were difficult to correct in OO and would sometimes cause OO to
crash.
I know that the OO developers have done a fantastic job, but I just can't
convert users unless this is an almost never occurrence.
Neil,
I've been using OOo versions 1.1.3 and 1.1.4 over the past two years for
the majority of documents I have created in the Division. Now I'm using
OOo 2.0 with sheer joy. I agree with the issues relating to some
documents, but since moving to OOo 2.0 ten days ago I haven't seen any
significant formatting issues.
Most of my output goes into pdf format for training and other purposes.
The originals get saves as .doc for compatibility and future editing. I
have a GP resource CD which is all pdfs produced in OOo for our GPs who
all have Acrobat courtesy of MD2, so they can open the documents without
recourse to MS Office, of course.
My big success story to-day, is to fix a document that our recent CEO,
now Chairman, edited in her laptop using Word 2003 and sent to our
Executive Assistant, unknown to me. The EA then edited it a number of
times in Word 97 till it ceased to work. On alerting me to the problem,
[it's the latest revision of our P&P manual] I found that the 58 page,
14,000 word document had bloated out to 265 megabytes. Yes, 265 megabytes!
I copied it to my local drive, then opened the 265MB file in OOo 2.0,
which took several minutes. It appeared to be fine in terms of
formatting and content. Then I saved it as a new file, which took
seconds. Aha! I'll bet the bloat is gone! Yes, the newly saved version
in Word 97/2000/XP format is now 800kb! That's a 300 times reduction in
the size of the file.
I returned to the EA's PC and we opened the new, 800kb version in Word
97. Perfect, formatting identical to the original document, all content
in place, including the graphic of the Division structure. A fossick
through the admin files showed various previous versions of the manual
from 380kb to 10MB in size. Content variations of maybe 3-400 words and
1 graphic explain these common Word file size variations, up to a point.
But 265 MB, that's nuts!
Ain't Word wonderful!! Not!!
Zimbra sounds great, I'll follow it up as our new CEO is interested in
an Exchange alternative. He wants the functionality, but we don't have
the $$$ for Exchange, and I hate to see us waste the money.
Greg
--
Greg Twyford
Information Management & Technology Program Officer
Canterbury Division of General Practice
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ph.: 02 9787 9033
Fax: 02 9787 9200
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