[Leaplist] MS Office vs. OpenOffice -- True Story ... I "recovered" an old document ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Ray Brunkow wrote:
> ONLY if the document must be edited by people OUTSIDE of the company
> using OO.

But what happens when those 3rd parties using *DIFFERENT* MS Office
versions?  How about in the same office to save money?

How many times has someone has to "Save As" to an *OLDER* MS Office
version, only to *LOSE* formatting?  Or an employee "use another
computer" to use the "correct" MS Office version?

Sorry, that's utter waste!

When you have more than one 3rd party who has such issues, get them to
install OpenOffice to read what you send them and they edit.  They
will quickly learn to appreciate the compatibility between the 3+
entities editing the document!

> in more then enough cases OO is capable of doing just that with limited issues.

Or better yet, one company still running MS Office 8.0 (97) or 9.0
(2000), while another is running MS Office 10.0 (XP) or, God help you,
11.0 (2003).  You can "solve" the problem for them quite nicely.

Since 1998, I've done *100%* of my documentation in either LyX or
StarOffice.  I've then converted to MS Word as needed.

When an old client couldn't read an old MS Word 7.0 (95) file on I
created for them 8 years ago, I send them a copy of it since they
thought it was corrupted.  They still couldn't read it in MS Word 11.0
(2003)!  I used StarOffice 8.0 to save it out to the latest MS Word
11.0 (2003) and they could bring it up -- almost flawlessly.

The next time I was in their office, I showed them the original under
StarOffice 8.0.  They were shocked how it looked "verbatim" from the
original under StarOffice 8.0, but not under MS Word.

"De-facto standard?"  *IMPOSSIBLE*!  *UTTERLY*IMPOSSIBLE*!!!