Don't get me wrong. Except for a few things that I choose to do with
LyX, my first choice for office software has long been Ooffice...
But I'm a little frustrated by what happens when I use it to open or
to 'save as' either a .doc or an .rtf document.
To make a long story short I'm having to dust off & update my resume etc...
I know from past experience that some potential employers won't accept
anything but {yultch} Word documents. Just as there are some who want
plain text. Now I happen to like the way Ooffice Writer handles things
like bullets and indent settings better than the way {eumfhh} word does
it. But I have to admit that {eiew} word does do such things. I note that
if I use 'save as' to export my resume to {yuck} word's .doc format, or
to the seemingly universal .rtf rich text format, Ooffice does me the
courtesy of warning me that some features may be lost. Though it is a
little aggravating that such features as the bullets and indents can't
be converted to the way {yeulph} word does do them when the file is saved
as a word format...
Of course, that wasn't really much of a surprise. And I already had
a solution. I did the save as to .doc format. And repeated the process
from a freshly opened .odt file to save it as .rtf, then I rebooted into
{yurph} Vista and opened the copies I'd made on a fat partition with
{eyuthf} office. I'd have to reboot again to say which version, but it
was the one Best Buy still had in stock back when all the laptops were
just starting to come with {yeacth} Vista. All I know for sure is what
they did to the UI (Just because somebody thought the pull down menus
were old hat.) was so atrocious that I very nearly lost my lunch.
Eventually though I was able to make enough formatting changes to make
the .doc files output almost identical to that which Ooffice gets from
the .odt file. I then rebooted back into Linux And looked at a copy of
the .doc file with Ooffice. That's when I realized that Oofice doesn't
import {eiyew} word documents very well either.
However the next thing I did was some more experimenting and found that
Abiword was able open it correctly. And when I made enough changes, I
checked, and even {flulph} word was able to correctly open and display
the results. And thank goodness, Abiword hasn't thrown away those nice
organized old fashioned pull down menus in favor of something more like a
big clumpy toolbar. So it's much easier to use it to make the .doc and
.rtf versions than it would be to use {blargheph} word, even if I didn't
have to boot {yulphft} vista for that...
I still like Ooffice better. But I'm glad I checked out Abiword today.
Now if I need to update it, I will start with the plain text version.
Then I'll copy the changes with Ooffice to get a full dress version, and
export it to pdf to get one that I'm sure will look right when somebody
views it. Then I'll repeat the process with Abiword and make a .doc and
an .rtf version just in case.
I did notice one thing that all three word processors had in common
though. When making sweeping changes to a document with a complex
pattern to it's formatting such as:
Topic:
Section name
* Bulleted Item
Non bulleted descriptive text.
* Bulleted Item
Non bulleted descriptive text.
...
Section name
...
Topic
...
It sure would be nice to be able to paste in unformatted text:
Topic
Section name
Item
Description
...
And then copy and paste the bullet, indent, tab stop, etc... "formatting"
from an existing line/paragraph of a previously formatted 'topic' on top
of a line or lines of text. Because it sure is a pain trying to drag the
tab and indent markers to the exact same positions in several separate
places in the document.
OK, I'll fess up. I'm better at making a short story long than making
the long one short... ;)
--
| ~^~ ~^~
| <o> <o> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
| ^ J(tWdy)P
| ~\___/~ <<[email protected]>>
| { snicker }
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