"mechanic" wrote:
On Thu, 16 May 2013 20:13:18 -0600, Ken Springer wrote:

But you cannot make blanket statements that people need MS Office
for compatibility reasons. The first thing to do is determine
what level of compatibility is needed. Then you can start to
determine if MS Office is necessary.

Impossible to tell what docs you may get to deal with in advance, so
best to go for MS-Office for the max compatibility. Why make things
harder for yourself?

And there's the outbound compatibility issue: if you generate a document
using tool X and send it to your customer who uses (supposedly) compatible
tool Y, in the general case you're not guaranteed that the customer will see
the document exactly as you saw it. If your employer's business is
delivering information to its paying customers, you do NOT want to risk even
a minor formatting glitch that could alter the interpretation of the report.

As noted upthread there's always the issue of different versions of a
program having different nuances, but for Office as long as the two
endpoints are within a version or maybe even two it's likely (but not
guaranteed!) that the version-related differences will be relatively minor
as long as the endpoint using the more recent version pays attention to the
downward compatibility features.

Personally, I would love to dump Office at my POE, and that option has been
formally considered...but our biggest customers are firmly wedded to Office
so we don't have much wiggle room.

Joe