On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 20:03 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote: > Greg Folkert wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 15:39 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote: > > > >> 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. > > > > > yeah - right - take something that's easy to do, and everybody I work > with knows how to do, and make it complicated - disk space is dirt > cheap, time is expensive It is easy to do. There are many products that DO just that. Sure at additional cost, but at least you can rely on them to not screw up the changes or word count. > > 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. > > > let's see - 4 people collaborate on a proposal, I send out a draft, > people comment, I accept some comments, reject others - lather, rinse, > repeat - send out the final document on paper and/or as PDF -- it's > easy, it works, it ain't broke, and there's no reason to fix it Yeap, McDonald's Drive-Thru is easy. So is any other Fast-Food drive-thru. Oh and make sure you save the electronic version of the printed one, you know will all the extra stuff not in there. Otherwise SOMEONE will send to the clients without the changes visible but still there and some stupid person will turn on changes visible... happens all the time. In fact, Word doesn't even count words properly. Legal filings limited to a certain number of words are regularly rejected with too high word counts. Word doesn't count the headers or footers properly (only once) even on a 25 page doc that prints them on every page, which courts DO count. > There are lots of reasons to dislike Word - for example, the excreble > HTML it generates when people insist on using it to prepare web pages - > but for run-of-the-mill document preparation in a corporate setting, > it's a pretty good tool. Practicality sometimes trumps religion. Practically all zealots claim this, so I see you are a zealot, just like me. I am not saying it is the BEST solution. Just that once Microsoft finally decides to fully and properly support the ODF, this crap will go away. -- 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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