On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 15:39 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote: > Ron Johnson wrote: > > > What do you need in a WP? Academic features (formal citations, > > embedded graphics, TOC, index, etc), movie/theater formating, > > something I haven't thought of? > > > > > Just to add another voice. Some of us have to exchange documents with > people who use Word - particularly in work settings, and features like > change tracking, Change tracking in word is a horrible feature. It makes the documents about 170% larger after each set of changes. You ever seen a 3 page specification document 90MB+ in size? I have. It was horrible. Someone could easily turn off revision control and you would lose eveyrthing except the current revision when saved. Change tracking should be done by a proper revision control program. > integrating data from excel, That isn't hard at all in OO. > and such are important. Important, only to those that do not know better. Data Integration is simple in OO.o, taking Calc into Writer is easy. Doing change control/tracking, a word processor *IS NOT* the tool to use for this. Never will be, and for those that DO use it for that... someday soon, they ARE going to get bitten horribly. Legally Word's change control/tracking is not binding. Which means it will bite one side or the other in a contract/legal dispute. > Yes, you can do a lot of that in Open Office, but it never works that > cleanly. (I just left a company where half the company uses Word, the > other half uses OO, and pulling documents together always turns out to > be incredibly painful). The only reason it is incredibly painful, is because Microsoft chooses to make it so. Look at OOXML vs. ODF. ODF is the *already* approved standard, where as Microsoft chooses to push another format. A 6000+page format, with about another 4000 pages of external reference. Say what you will, when Microsoft finally agrees to support ODF FULLY (and actually does), not half assed like it wants to... These problems will go away, with Microsoft throwing a tantrum along the whole way. I seems to recall, that recently Sun has a FULL-ON DOC to ODF conversion tool, that soon will support the ODF spec for Spreadsheets *AND* Documents, not just DOCUMENTS like the Microsoft built one. Oh, and it should work with Office XP and 2K3, unlike the Microsoft version only working with 2K7, thereby forcing an upgrade. -- greg@gregfolkert.net Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at the playfield. -- Thane Walkup
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