Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 30, 2005 05:25 AM
OO.org wastes too much time with formatting issues. For example I work for a large non-profit. We have to pull our employee manual templates off the intranet, customize them to suite our needs and send them back to be checked an approved. This is a fairly basic 40 page MS office document with bullets, headers, footers, and lots and lots of text.
OO.org just mangles it too much to be worth it. Sure 98% of the text comes over, just no in the right place. Am I expected to spend hours pushing text around trying to get it to look the way its suppoed to. In the "real" world its simply not acceptable to send a file to someone that has screwed up formatting. They won't just "deal with it" or "spend a few moments fixing the formatting". They'll will however wonder what the hell is wrong with you and why you can't do your job properly.
If you need to work with Word docs on a regular basis you should avoid OO.org at all costs. It just can't get it right and you'll end up spending forever reformatting. Even worse you'll finally get it right in OO.org and then it will look scrwed up in MS Office. And of course while you can take steps like above to minimize exports issues, the person your sending docs to will still have formatting issues.
I btw don't blame the OO.org developers in the slighest. This is Microsoft's mess and the entire world is the worse for it. But when it comes to interacting with others you need a program that can properly read and write to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.doc files. Anything less isn't acceptable. For that reason OO.org will continue to be unuseable anywhere you have to receive and send MS Office files.
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Not worth if it you work with MS Office files
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 30, 2005 05:25 AMOO.org just mangles it too much to be worth it. Sure 98% of the text comes over, just no in the right place. Am I expected to spend hours pushing text around trying to get it to look the way its suppoed to. In the "real" world its simply not acceptable to send a file to someone that has screwed up formatting. They won't just "deal with it" or "spend a few moments fixing the formatting". They'll will however wonder what the hell is wrong with you and why you can't do your job properly.
If you need to work with Word docs on a regular basis you should avoid OO.org at all costs. It just can't get it right and you'll end up spending forever reformatting. Even worse you'll finally get it right in OO.org and then it will look scrwed up in MS Office. And of course while you can take steps like above to minimize exports issues, the person your sending docs to will still have formatting issues.
I btw don't blame the OO.org developers in the slighest. This is Microsoft's mess and the entire world is the worse for it. But when it comes to interacting with others you need a program that can properly read and write to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.doc files. Anything less isn't acceptable. For that reason OO.org will continue to be unuseable anywhere you have to receive and send MS Office files.
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