[lbo-talk] Open Office v. MS Office

Tayssir John Gabbour tjg at pentaside.org
Tue Apr 19 03:35:02 PDT 2011


As a fellow emacser (I use it as my OS as much as possible), I prefer to test using MSOffice when my audience uses it. Unless there's a good reason to act otherwise.

So if you use OpenOffice/LibreOffice, quick smoke-tests on your free copy of MSOffice should suffice.

(But my uses are different from the ones you've mentioned, so my patterns might not apply.)

I once generated simple CSV files for Excel users. Looked nice in OpenOffice. Surprisingly, they told me Excel had major problems with the decimals; it was trying to convert them weirdly or something, rather than just accepting that 123.45 meant just that — no more, no less. (I don't remember the exact problem, just that it was creepy to someone like me who'd never seriously used spreadsheets.)

Since I have horrific visions of errors cascading and snowballing through the organization because of some insane decimal problem, this implies I must at least test on Excel.

That means a little extra work for me, if I'm in a Linux environment, to do a sanity-check on a Mac or a Windows VM.

All the best, Tj

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:54 AM, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:
> I am going to have to produce reports, tables, budget, etc. Typical office
> bullshit. My current OS is asshole XP.
>
> What I use now is all free: emacs and LaTeX, precompiled for XP. I never use
> tables, but now I'll have to.
>
> I am used to doing most office work by hand with a calculator, then
> transfering it
> into an ascii file (emacs) and laying it out for reports in LaTeX. From
> LaTeX the files are converted in PDF. The simplest distribution method is
> PDF attachments to email.
>
> However this process does not allow the organization's management to modify
> anything I produce except with handwritten editing notes. We've corresponded
> just a little and I get MS Word formats from them while I send them PDF or
> simple ASCII.
>
> That means to me they have no idea how to convert DOC <=> PDF or even
> realize they can pull ASCII into Word and then send it back to some
> near-ASCII format with the TXT extension. This org is really funky, and I am
> having a hard time finding my calm center.
>
> Now the question. Is it worth my while to download Open Office and install
> it. Does Open Office have enough file conversion options to take care of
> this file format bullshit? Does Open Office do a good enough job, so if I
> send a document that looks like a Word document with a DOC extension, their
> Word program will reproduce it correctly?
>
> Or, is it just much more simple to get the organization to make a free copy
> of MS Office available, and I work in that environment instead? (While I
> puke at its dysfunctionality...)
>
> I've noticed that Wordpad works to display MS Word documents and allows
> edits and saving. Most business text isn't long enough to exceed Wordpad
> limits. What I am
> more worried about here is Excel and the spreadsheet arithmetic functions.
>
> My nighmare vision for NCLB and its clones. High school students are taught
> that proficiency in Excel is mathematical competence.
>
> CG
>
>
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