From: "Jim Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Jerry Clancy wrote: >> Oo can't even save to an old Office 2000-compatible format or read them >> well. I also receive an important newsletter created by the author in Word >> 2002 every day and Oo almost makes it unreadable because of the way it >> doesn't handle boxed text, spacing (adds a lot) and mixed fonts in the same >> paragraph. Making the adjustments to make the daily document readable just >> sucks up too much time. >> >> I went with Oo on my new box in lieu of handing MS yet more money but the >> reality is that we must deal with a world that demands we pretty seamlessly >> move between Oo and ALL versions of Word, like it or not. > > I don’t dispute what you say. > > However I’ve been working with OpenOffice Writer at work for about 5 > years now and part of my work involves converting letter copy sent to us > by clients to put into mail-merge print programs. We have a large number > of clients and the letter copy often comes in Microsoft .doc format and > some clients are very fussy about formatting. > > But the only problem I’ve encountered is the occasional graphic not > appearing in exactly the correct position. > > In short, we are constantly converting from .doc to .odf without any > difficulty. > > You might post a copy of this newsletter to some place we can copy it > down, if this is allowable. The difficulty might be ... and I'm only > guessing here ... that the editor of the newsletter is using a feature > or features in Microsoft Office that most people don’t use, for example > setting word spacing to WordPerfect standard (which is actually much > better than default MS standard and is narrower); but OpenOffice doesn't > support WordPefect character spacing. > > > This two-way > > conversion should be a top priority for the Oo team, IMHO, because > > lacking it severely inhibits its adoption. > > You may not realize how often people claim that some feature that they > want should be top priority for the Oo team. The trouble is that there > are so many such top priority features requested. > > But you should be able to use MS Word Viewer to read your newsletter. > That is a free product. > > See > http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3657CE88-7CFA-457A-9AEC-F4F827F20CAC&DisplayLang=en > > for the viewer. > > Jim Allan >
Have you tried to see what the Office 2000 and 2002 files look like in a Word Viewer? This is the link for Word 2003 Viewer. I just googled for it. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en See if the Word files look OK through the Viewer. That will save he-said/she-said type of discussion. If it look good using the Viewer, and not good in OOo, then that answers the question. If you have an over version of Office, you may find a extention from MS to view newer version within you older version. That is what I did for viewing/importing Office 2007 files into my MS Office package. Although I use OpenOffice.org for over 98% (a guess) of my office needs. I have little trouble with what you are saying, but that is what MS Viewers are for. Tim L.
