From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 18 6:35:16 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ness.aae.uiuc.edu (ness.aae.uiuc.edu [128.174.132.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A04B637B400 for ; Mon, 18 Feb 2002 06:35:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dmmcf@localhost) by ness.aae.uiuc.edu (8.11.4/8.11.4) id g1IEfjg23257; Mon, 18 Feb 2002 08:41:45 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dmmcf@uiuc.edu) X-Authentication-Warning: ness.aae.uiuc.edu: dmmcf set sender to dmmcf@uiuc.edu using -f To: "Mike Meyer" Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Advice sought re MS Office compatibility References: <15472.44937.241831.56766@guru.mired.org> From: dmmcf@uiuc.edu (D. Michael McFarland) Date: 18 Feb 2002 08:41:41 -0600 In-Reply-To: <15472.44937.241831.56766@guru.mired.org> Message-ID: <863czylumy.fsf@ness.aae.uiuc.edu> Lines: 40 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii 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 "Mike Meyer" writes: > I'd say StarOffice. I use Applixware as an Office suite myself, but it > doesn't rate very high on the MS-compatible scale, and it's not clear > that the FreeBSD version has a future. Thanks for your observations. Because MS compatibility is my overriding concern, I'll take another look at StarOffice. > 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. Yep, it drives me nuts. > just go > back to running the older versions of StarOffice until you get a > document that it doesn't understand because one of them upgraded and > forgot to save it in the old version so that everyone else has to > ugprade to read it. That's how I came to be looking at this problem again. Too many of them have upgraded, and saving in an old format is (perceived as) too much hassle. A few more such requests and _I_ will become the problem, not Word. > Of course, the best thing to do if you're collaborating on a document > is to load it into *your* favorite application for dealing with > documents of that type, do your work, and send it back to them in that > applications format. A truly fitting sabotage. But these collaborators are my friends, and the documents are important. I wouldn't want to sabotage my friends. Unless, of course, it's for their own good. ;-) Cheers, Michael To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message