Ron Proctor wrote:
James, what is the reason a person has Open Office on their computer, if they haveM.S. Word, Excell and the full ofice suite, or the full wordPerfect offive suite? What purpose does Open Office serve a person? I was under the impression that a person would use O.O. mostly if they did not want to put up the money to buy the expensive WordPerfect or Microsoft Office Suite.
Well, when we started using OpenOffice.org at work some years back, we found it superior to Microsoft Office in a number of areas, especially in converting from Excel file to DBF files which we do a lot of.
This may not be the case now, but back then when using Microsoft Excel, the conversion would stop immediately if there was a single blank row in the input table, we would have to set the spreadsheet font to 10 point Courier New or a similar fixed-pitch font or truncation of fields would be likely to occur, and the translation program would assume regardless that we wanted to convert to Code Page 850, which sometimes resulted in loss of characters. Also if the first 10 characters of fields in the first row were identical, the resulting DBF file would contain identically named fields and sometimes be unreadable as a result.
In Calc blank rows were copied with no problem, all fields automatically had lengths equal to the field with the largest length in that column regardless of font, it always asks about the output code page, and it automatically modifies any duplicate field names in the output file — a much more friendly situation.
The mail merge in Microsoft Word also never worked properly for files of over about 1,000 records. The program would jump back to record 1 but keep on printing with no warning. This occurred at several different shops and we soon learned to first break our files into smaller units of 1,000 records or less. We have not had this problem with OpenOffice.org.
There were other improvements as well here and there. It wasn’t only money that has kept us stuck on OpenOffice.org.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
