OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Mike McCarty]

Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 10:50 PM +0930 9/29/05, Tim wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 14:26 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
>>
>>>When I use OpenOffice, and want to save something that I created using
>>>MS Office, I find that it frequently wants to warn me that
>>>I may be losing some special features. For this reason,
>>>I have abandoned using OO for editing stuff created with MSO.
>>>
>>>I don't know enough about these things to know whether anything
>>>in the files are actually at risk, but rather than lose them,
>>>I re-boot to Windows and do the editing there.
>>
>>Do a test...  Usually, the warnings about things like how some document
>>formats mightn't support some styling effects, might not do tabs or
>>margins in the same way, etc.
> 
> 
> As a programmer, foolish warnings such as the above "All might not be safe"
> disgust me.  If the code thinks that something might not work, the author
> is responsible for making it do the right thing.  In this case, make the
> file in a temporary place (and this is the only responsible way to do it
> ever) and notice if anything didn't make it through the export process.  If
> that happens, /then/ warn the user, tell them what got lost, and ask what
> to do.  Such a warning actually means something that the user might care
> about.  If they don't use any non-exportable feature in a document, they
> won't get any warning; if they do, they can at least decide whether to keep
> using the feature.

I started to reply to his message, but you said it soooo much better!

Why should I follow around after OO when I can just boot Windows in
about a minute and a half, and be assured that the doc is ok? If OO
knows there is a problem, then it should tell me. If there is no
problem, it shouldn't frighten me. If it doesn't know, then why should
I use it?

Mike
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