On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Allan Atherton wrote:
> 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. > > ... > > And I don't see how you can work with Word and Excel for free. I would expect the spreadsheet/word processor to open up a Word file, maybe not be able to edit the image, but also not damage the image. It should be fine for handling the common features of MS Office's formats. When it comes to the obscure, MS added them for 5 users, stuff, it shouldn't be able to _do_ them, but should not break them either. Now X11 is available for OS X, I hope to go back to using AbiWord and Gnumeric, as both have always impressed me in the past as very good. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
