On 5/17/13 5:24 PM, Joe Morris wrote:
"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 and mechanic,

I'm not saying there are no situations where MS Office isn't the best
choice. I'm saying it's not the best choice 100% of the time. I'd bet
for all the Office sales, Office/OO/LO is the best choice less than a
third of the users out there.

As for the argument that everyone in a collaborative project needs to
have the same program, at one time it was probably necessary. These
days, I think it's a bogus argument. In such a situation there should
only be one person doing all the editing of changes to the final
document product. If you send Word files out, you might get 10 Word
documents all with changes. Some of those people may not know how to
use the editing and annotation markup features of Word. So they simply
edit your document, and you have to figure out what's been changed.
Been there, done that, not a pretty picture.

After you have those edited copies, and you now have 11 Word documents
to keep track of, and not lose sight of which was the original.

Send out PDF files, and tell them annotated PDF files as a reply is the
only thing that will be accepted. Otherwise, the reply will not be
considered. Now you will have 10 PDF files returned, guaranteed to
contain both the original text and the suggested text, all in one
document for you to work with.

And if you do it this way, who cares what word processor everyone else
is using.

It's not your job to deal with your collaborators' ignorance. It's
their job to learn how to use the software of choice.

Harsh? Yes. But you are guaranteed to be more cost and time effective,
increasing your productivity level.

Change your paradigm. Think outside the box. Look for something better
for your situation.

I'm retired, and in the summer I'm a combination steam locomotive
engineer/tour guide/interpreter. This year I have to have a new spiel.
And frankly, I've found office software to be cumbersome at best.

But I recently found a word processor called Scrivener, and for my
purpose at the moment, I'm so impressed, and finding it so easy to use
and be able to keep track of all my research information at the same
time. So far, it seems to kick the c**p out of office suite software.

But if I was a secretary for a lawyer, this program would truly suck! LOL

It's a case of finding a program that fits your needs and the way you
work, not changing your needs and the way you work to fit the program.


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.3
Firefox 20.0
Thunderbird 17.0.5
LibreOffice 4.0.1.2