From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 18 14:43:38 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 3715C37B400 for ; Mon, 18 Feb 2002 14:43:34 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 94328 invoked by uid 100); 18 Feb 2002 22:43:31 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15473.33682.353887.609959@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 16:43:30 -0600 To: dmmcf@uiuc.edu (D. Michael McFarland) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advice sought re MS Office compatibility In-Reply-To: <34125683@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.46 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.5-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG D. Michael McFarland types: > "Mike Meyer" writes: > > If the only reason you're running it is to read documents from people > > who are to lazy to convert them to a non-proprietary format, > They're not lazy or unwilling to cooperate, they're just convinced > that MS Word has won the document file format wars and we'd all be > better off saving and exchanging all our work as .doc files. They > readily admit Word's inferiority--in fact, they often lament it. Ok, I replied once, but I want to add a word. And more information. MS Word has won the desktop document production war. It hasn't won the file format war - because it isn't a fixed file format. I'm sure even *they* have been bitten by having someone using a newer version send them a document that they then couldn't read. D. Michael McFarland types: > Cliff Sarginson writes: > > Is Wordperfect the answer ? > > I don't know if the Linux version of it runs on FreeBSD, but I guess it > > should (I didn't check the ports). Unlike Word, WP doesn't change it's > > internal structure every 5 minutes, I believe it handles Word > > documents...just a thought. > Good idea. I'll look into it. WordPerfect 7 ran on FreeBSD. It was even in the ports tree for a while. StarOffice generally dealt with Word documents better than WordPerfect. If you've got to deal with powerpoint files, I don't think there's any other choice than StarOffice, though I haven't looked at the office suite built around WordPerfect. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message