Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, John Carlyle-Clarke wrote: I get a lot of Word documents at work, both .doc and .docx. Lots of Word users can't open Docx either (they don't have or can't get the compatibility pack) so I think it's a totally pointless format. At least Doc - for good or ill - is a de facto standard, and now well reverse engineered and supported. Except that .doc isn't really a format; it's a memory dump with place holders. At least .docx is a proper mark-up format, although actually quite a poor one. It still has lots of binary blobs in it to get round the shortcomings of its .doc legacy. I find that complex Doc Docx documents - ones that are really DTP jobs - never open well in OOo. I certainly wouldn't try to edit any of our company brochures in OOo. It does do a slightly better job of Doc than Docx, and the support does seem to improve over time, with each successive version rendering them a bit more like Word does. Of course, as any fule kno, Word often has the same problem with documents from earlier or later versions. The fault is with the Doc file and the quirks of Word versions, not OOo. The average end user wouldn't see it that way, of course. And the reason for that is that .doc is just a memory dump. The Open Document Format used in OOo (.odt, .ods, etc) was designed from the ground up to be a proper mark-up language based on XML so it starts from a completely different standpoint. Unless the world abandons the format, interoperability should get better over the years, not worse. -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
Terry Coles wrote: On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, John Carlyle-Clarke wrote: I get a lot of Word documents at work, both .doc and .docx. Lots of Word users can't open Docx either (they don't have or can't get the compatibility pack) so I think it's a totally pointless format. At least Doc - for good or ill - is a de facto standard, and now well reverse engineered and supported. Except that .doc isn't really a format; it's a memory dump with place holders. At least .docx is a proper mark-up format, although actually quite a poor one. It still has lots of binary blobs in it to get round the shortcomings of its .doc legacy. Oh I agree, .doc is an awful format. It's just a reasonably well understood awful format! .docx starts off looking vaguely OK in theory, but it's not OOXML compliant and so is presumably soon-to-be-deprecated. OOXML is totally let down by the details of the implementation of the standard, the binary hacks, the poor documentation, and the poor execution of it in Office 2007, not to mention patent issues and all the other mess. Couple that with MS's strange journey on document formats (Office 2003 XML anyone?), one wonders what future the .docx standard has even within MS products, now that MS in theory are moving to supporting ODF, or OOXML, or something :) And the reason for that is that .doc is just a memory dump. The Open Document Format used in OOo (.odt, .ods, etc) was designed from the ground up to be a proper mark-up language based on XML so it starts from a completely different standpoint. Unless the world abandons the format, interoperability should get better over the years, not worse. Agreed again, the ODF is probably not perfect but it's a lot better than any of the alternatives. Being an open standard should allow implementations to converge rather than diverge. Then again, that didn't really work with HTML and Internet Explorer! And I'm still not sure what MS's intentions are for ODF. -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, Simon O'Riordan wrote: The 9.10 Ubuntu comes with OO 3.1 as standard. This can now handle all microsoft Office file types without switching between compatibilities. For example, DOCX is now a standard file type. I didn't realise that; I thought it was done through a plug-in. No one sends me .docx, so I wouldn't have any occasion to try it. I've only got one gripe with OO Writer; it turns on an irritating and unwanted numbering format when you type in numbers such as chapter heading numbers. It then tries to format every paragraph auto-tragically, and by the time I switched it off, it took all the page numbers off too. I think OO is too big and important a step forward to still be indulging in this sort of trickery, badly at that. Methinks they're trying to mimic MS Office behaviour too much. This is one of my pet gripes with Office 2002 (which is the company standard at work). I'm sure I'll learn how to get it right, but I shouldn't have to; the convenience of MS Office will be the reason people go on spending money on it. Actually; going on past performance, I suspect OOo will get it right eventually. Remember; they've only being developing it for a fraction of the time that MS have been developing Office. To summarise, IMO OO is close to being a killer. But not quite yet. It won't be a killer until the enterprise lets go of MS Office. It's happening in the educational sector and it's happening in the government sector, but it will probably need a younger generation of IT staff for it to happen across the enterprise. Never under-estimate the resistance to change! -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 20:21 +, Terry Coles wrote: On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, Simon O'Riordan wrote: The 9.10 Ubuntu comes with OO 3.1 as standard. This can now handle all microsoft Office file types without switching between compatibilities. For example, DOCX is now a standard file type. I didn't realise that; I thought it was done through a plug-in. No one sends me .docx, so I wouldn't have any occasion to try it. I've only got one gripe with OO Writer; it turns on an irritating and unwanted numbering format when you type in numbers such as chapter heading numbers. It then tries to format every paragraph auto-tragically, and by the time I switched it off, it took all the page numbers off too. I think OO is too big and important a step forward to still be indulging in this sort of trickery, badly at that. Methinks they're trying to mimic MS Office behaviour too much. This is one of my pet gripes with Office 2002 (which is the company standard at work). I'm sure I'll learn how to get it right, but I shouldn't have to; the convenience of MS Office will be the reason people go on spending money on it. Actually; going on past performance, I suspect OOo will get it right eventually. Remember; they've only being developing it for a fraction of the time that MS have been developing Office. To summarise, IMO OO is close to being a killer. But not quite yet. It won't be a killer until the enterprise lets go of MS Office. It's happening in the educational sector and it's happening in the government sector, but it will probably need a younger generation of IT staff for it to happen across the enterprise. Never under-estimate the resistance to change! -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux Interesting, because the last time I received a docx, yes I was able to edit it, but I had to save it as a .doc. But was that before I updated? I don't think so. I had the interesting experience of editing a (word) document under OO, and being able to edit a table in it (the TOC), But when I pushed it down to the XP machine, Word reformatted it and changed the number of pages, and I could not edit that table! I ended up doing it in OO and saving it as a pdf to print. That is actually my main bugbear with OO and Word. Their ideas of A4 differ. Peter M -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
Interesting, because the last time I received a docx, yes I was able to edit it, but I had to save it as a .doc. I knew it could read DOCX before, but to my surprise when I edited a DOCX tonight and saved, there was still only the one file containing my edits, a DOCX. So I checked the available file types in the 'save as' dialogue and they were all there including DOCX. Simono -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
Re: [Dorset] Open Office 3.1 Pros and Cons.
Peter Merchant wrote: I had the interesting experience of editing a (word) document under OO, and being able to edit a table in it (the TOC), But when I pushed it down to the XP machine, Word reformatted it and changed the number of pages, and I could not edit that table! I ended up doing it in OO and saving it as a pdf to print. That is actually my main bugbear with OO and Word. Their ideas of A4 differ. I get a lot of Word documents at work, both .doc and .docx. Lots of Word users can't open Docx either (they don't have or can't get the compatibility pack) so I think it's a totally pointless format. At least Doc - for good or ill - is a de facto standard, and now well reverse engineered and supported. I find that complex Doc Docx documents - ones that are really DTP jobs - never open well in OOo. I certainly wouldn't try to edit any of our company brochures in OOo. It does do a slightly better job of Doc than Docx, and the support does seem to improve over time, with each successive version rendering them a bit more like Word does. Of course, as any fule kno, Word often has the same problem with documents from earlier or later versions. The fault is with the Doc file and the quirks of Word versions, not OOo. The average end user wouldn't see it that way, of course. -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2010-01-05 20:00 Dorset LUG: http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.orgchannel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
