OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Mike McCarty]

Craig White wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 17:22 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:

[snip big quote which didn't get referenced]

> of course you are ignoring the fact that if you use Word and save the
> file in a foreign format, you get the same type of warnings.

When did I say that Word was well-written? I don't recall saying that.
I don't recall defending Word at all.

> I guess I don't see the distinction except that the warnings in OO only
> come when you save files in .DOC format and in Word, when you don't save
> in .DOC format.

I don't recall trying to compare the quality of OO with the quality of
Word in any respect.

Lazy programming is lazy programming, whoever does it.

One distinction is that OO can *know* when it loads in that it
cannot save out without either
	(1) losing information, or
	(2) changing to a different format, or
	(3) both.
Word doesn't have to warn about that until saving the output
because it *can* write out in the original format. If one saves
to a format which cannot store the original, but that cannot
be known until that time, then it is reasonable to warn (if
info *will* be lost) that this is going to occur. If OO waits
until I tell it to export my document in plain ASCII to say
that I'm definitely going to lose some stuff, and asks whether
I want to continue, that's fine, and it's also fine for Word
to wait until one exports into a foreign format that something
is definitely going to be lost. If a generic "YOU MAY LOSE SOMETHING"
gets displayed just because of change of format, but nothing is
actually going to get lost, then that's bad, whoever did it.

Perhaps you are right. The only distinction between the crap
MS puts out and OO is that OO is open source crap. :-)

[take that as a very BIG smiley!]

Mike
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