Re: Family tech support

["David Lodge" <dave () cirt net>]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:02:49 -0000, Nick FitzGerald  
<nick () virus-l demon co uk> wrote:
> First, and I'm no MS apologist, the problem set you describe has
> usually been avoidable _if_ the IT folk at said enterprise actually do
> the job, read the fine manuals and roll out the new version with
> policies enforcing the "use format X" option (or even just push such
> policies as part of their standard environment management stuff.

Ah; you've never met consultants or marketeers then :-)

> Second -- and much bigger -- is that while it can be a PitA to Email
> the sender back and explain how to "Save as... and choose the 'correct'
> file format" that is rather different than the situation where the OOO
> user sent a Word-capable format document that does not open properly,
> or that does, but is clearly seriously munged or quickly becomes that
> way after you, say, decide that there needs to be a comma after that
> word in the opening sentence.

And, that's the old reason why the word format should be killed for data  
exchange: nobody knows it, not even Microsoft. Use ODT (not ooxml, as not  
even Word can write it according to the spec).

> My "complaints" with OOO are not that it does not (natively) do MS
> formats, but that it is incomprehensibly buggy in _all_ its format-
> handling capabilities.

And this is where I have the problem with your argument: I have multiple  
files that I've written on my server that go back to April 2001, when it  
was StarOffice 5, and I can read them all exactly as they were when I  
wrote them; 5 different computers ago and using a different Operating  
System (IIRC it was on SuSE 7). The only time I've ever had a problem with  
OOo reading files is generally due to badly mangled word docs. These are  
also not trivial docs: they have embedded objects, images, layout change  
and a host of styles. I wonder whether this is a YMMV situation.
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