On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, John Dell wrote:
Hi Sebastian,
Sebastian Smith wrote:
IMHO, at best Microsoft would add support for open formats in the Office
suite before a significant decline in sales occurs. Of course, they'll
limit editing capabilities for those files so that users will rely more
heavily on their proprietary formats... but it would be a start.
I'm trying to institute a policy similar to Massachusetts at my office
because I'm having several document compatibility issues. For example, in
our conference room we have an iMac running OS 9.x that is capable of
playing Powerpoint presentations stored in early formats. The "creative"
department is also beginning to use Keynote, a presentation software by
Apple that is designed to run on OS X 10.2.8+. The problems? A)
Powerpoint cannot be used to its full capability because the new file
formats cannot be played (if they are fonts/etc get all messed up), B)
Keynote won't run on the conference room computer. Furthermore, when
preparing a presentation to be given offsite, I find it naive to assume
that the presentation you are creating in PPT, keynote, or OOo will display
properly, or even be openable at another location. For that matter, it is
also naive to assume that any document file will be displayed exactly as
you see it at another location -- what if you used an odd font, or are
using different versions of software. For these reasons I'm trying to push
management into a PDF only policy. Users can continue to use the Office
suite (or whatever they prefer) to edit their documents, but the end result
must be in PDF format. The software to support this structure will cost
more, but the end result will be less headaches.
Why would it cost more? Have you tried out PDF Creator
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator)?
Thanks John! I've been looking for this program for a while!
- Sebastian
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