OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Robin Laing]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
SNIP
> Now you want to save the modified document in .doc or .txt format. 
> oowriter can't tell until it actually carries out the conversion if 
> anything you've done could not be preserved in the external format. 
> (Well, for txt format, it knows for sure that information will be lost, 
> but it can't know if you care.)  You might also have created a document 
> from scratch in oowriter, and oowriter would never have had the 
> opportunity to analyse any version in an external format.  Your creation 
> would be in OOo format with no possibility of knowing what formatting 
> information might be lost on conversion until the conversion is carried 
> out.
> 
> One way to proceed would be to export the document anyway and warn you 
> ex post that formatting information was lost during the conversion.  But 
> that doesn't seem to be the convention.  The convention seems to be to 
> warn you in advance if the conversion might fail and ask if that's what 
> you want. You could argue that an ex post warning would be better, but 
> you can't argue that oowriter can always know ex ante precisely when the 
> warning is needed.
> 
>>
>> 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
>>
> 
Now if MS would only warn that it's closed format isn't that 
transportable across versions of Word.  One reason that business my wife 
works for moved to OOo.  To much time wasted re-formatting documents 
between Mac and Windows Word.  At least OOo works the same between 
Linux, Mac and Windows with only minor differences.

And as my wife said today, OOo files are so much smaller than Word files.

-- 
Robin Laing