Henri Yandell <bayard at generationjava.com> wrote: > While large companies may need the complex word documents you describe, > the average company should be able to get the basic features of Word for > free. Word Processors are not rocket science, they're ages old technology.
The average company is in business. It's documents need to be usable to those outside their office walls. Your free old-tech word processor needs to open and modify a current Word document, and save it back to a proper Word document that the rest of the business world can also open and modify. MacLinkPlus will not always do the job; I have a little Excel spreadsheet from 1998 that I bet will break it, and I have seen MacLink drop formatting in Word documents. If you have incompatible "in-house" type software, your files will not be welcome to others. In the late 80's my agency gave up trying to deal with Mac files that they received, and when the world went to Word, they changed to that and gave up dealing with WordPerfect files, too. If you wanted to business with the agency, you had to do it in Word and Excel and Powerpoint. In recent years I was able to do some work telecommuting from home with a firm in Lexington. They would not have hired me unless we could work seamlessly in Word and Excel and Powerpoint. Last summer I worked for a small firm in Bluegrass Industrial Park. Again, it was Word and Excel. And I don't see how you can work with Word and Excel for free. Allan Atherton | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
