Re: [tlug] OpenOffice.org/MS-Word

[Patrick Niessen <patrick.niessen@example.com>]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 19:29, Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> Another thing OO needs is a set of (reliable) mass conversion tools.  I
> know of a certain company with about 25 employees that might actually be
> open to a fully Linux-based network if they had something that could
> reliably import/export office files, and something that would do it in
> batch mode would be ideal. They have hundreds of them - probably thousands
> - sitting on a W2K Server machine.  Converting one at a time would be a
> PITA.

Yeah it would be nice, but for this task you can use MS-Office (if you switch, 
you will still have the old licenses).  Use VBA (or Activestate Perl OLE if 
you want) to open each file and save them as something else.

We did something simialr in my previous company for PDF creation: User can 
click a Menu in Word (created by Macro) to make a PDF.  The Macro then save 
the DOC somewhere on the network.  A special server with Office on it would 
check if there are any new files and open them, print them to PS file 
somewhere, then edit the header of the PS to change some paramters that got 
buggered up by the printer driver.  Adobe distiller sitting on the same 
server would pick up the final PS, and create PDF.

For your Client, you could convert Word to RTF, Excel to Quatro Pro or TXT, 
whatever format you find out to be working best.

Patrick