Re: [tlug] OpenOffice.org1.0.2

["Jim O'Connell" <oconnell@example.com>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 15:43:29 +0900
Patrick Niessen <patrick.niessen@example.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [tlug] OpenOffice.org1.0.2

> > document was really rough.  Granted, I blame Office XP for much of this,
> > but I would like to see OO better able to handle such cruft.
> 
> One should remember that new versions of MS-Office often have problems with 
> doucments created in earlier versions (->Access).  The worst case is people 
> with different versions working on the same document ... 

Also, it's been my experience that heavily edited, worked-over MSOffice documents bloat over and over until even native MS apps that created them cannot open them.
The solution seems to be to open a new document and copy and paste the whole thing (ctrl-a, ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v.) into the new doc.

I've had really good success using OO, especially for documents that *I* create and send to MS users. 
On several occasions, too, OO was able to open docs that were too corrupted for MS Office to open.

We have PDF distiller (or whatever it's called) on the machines here at work, so I can always tell people to export to pdf and mail it to me if the formatting is critical.  

> But in case of Graphics Design/ Layout I think it is very uncommon to use 
> different versions of the program.  I hear even in DTP there are differences 
> between Pagemaker for Mac and PC, how can we expect OO or Star Office to work 
> with it?

It shouldn't.  Neither should Word. Word isn't really supposed to be a PageMaker-style tool.  It's supposed to be a word processor. 

Microsoft doesn't play nice with their file formats for documents, but OO/SO really seems to.  If you've never looked at how an OO doc (.sxw) file is put together, it's really quite elegant.  It's a zip file.  Inside are a few XML files that have your content and your formatting nicely seperated.  I don't know if the XML is clean or not, but at a glance, I could tell that it was something that I could work with if I had to pick through them with perl or something.

What I think we really need is an .sxw import/export plugin for Word.  If that were available, OpenOffice could really take off.

Jim
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