[plug] [OT] Office XP 30 day evil

[J Michael Gilks]

On Friday 21 Mar 2003 2:15 pm, Craig Ringer wrote:
>  The number 1 issue is word-doc import formatting though - the drooling
> idiots that are some of our less mentally talented advertisers /will/
> design their ads in MS Word, no matter what we say. Accepted formats
> list be damnned! *sigh*. The staff used to just say its a ".doc file"
> and "we can't open them" but now they can with OO.o.... alas with borked
> formatting, misaligned pix and boxes, etc. In a way its worse than
> before because they expect that having a capability means having it work
> /perfectly/. So I can empathise with what you're saying there - you
> really just can't win.
I have been playing a little at work importing word documents and converting 
to OO.o and vice versa.
The number one problem I have noticed is badly formatted word documents.
ie blank lines to get a new page, images anchored to the page rather than text 
with wrapping turned on and blank lines behind them. Subtle mistakes anyone 
who didn't know what they were doing could make.8=)
OO.o can't do anything about the blank lines, but when saving the document to 
OO.o format it seems to make intelligent decisions about image placement and 
generally puts them back where they should be.
In short' it may be a little unfair to blame OO.o for operator shortcomings. I 
have found it very enlightening to turn on formatting characters when looking 
for problems in conversion.
The return email asking people to correctly format documents before 
criticising OO.o's performance is never appreciated, but apoplexy can be fun 
in someone else.
I am trying to get some training in the use of word processors implemented, 
but everyone knows how to use word, so some resistance is being encountered.
Just what I have tried, may be worth the 2c.
Love
Mike.