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Date:      18 Feb 2002 10:19:53 -0600
From:      dmmcf@uiuc.edu (D. Michael McFarland)
To:        Matt H <matt@proweb.co.uk>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Advice sought re MS Office compatibility
Message-ID:  <86bsemkbiu.fsf@ness.aae.uiuc.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20020218153614.34b05e8f.matt@proweb.co.uk>
References:  <15472.44937.241831.56766@guru.mired.org> <863czylumy.fsf@ness.aae.uiuc.edu> <20020218153614.34b05e8f.matt@proweb.co.uk>

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Matt H <matt@proweb.co.uk> writes:

> > .. 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.
> 
> you could always send them a macro & toolbar to save their work as a
> different format

Which I perceive as too much work...for me.  But I'll keep it in mind,
in case my strategy of pretending Word doesn't exist does not work
out.

> Word & Office can be told to play nicely if you make a bit
> of effort,

You're right. But.

Not meaning to rant, but I've made more than a bit of effort.  Over
the last decade and a half, I've gone from TeX to Word to TeX to
FrameMaker to TeX to Word to TeX.  I've run on Suns, Macs and PCs, the
last under Windows 98 and NT, Linux and FreeBSD.  Every non-TeX,
non-Unix excursion has been driven by a desire to cooperate with some
group of colleagues, has involved a real effort over several months
and multiple, non-trivial documents, and has ultimately led to my
being immensely frustrated while my friends were none the wiser.
"What's McFarland's problem?  Everybody else likes <product>."

I'm a little fried on the whole subject.  For ten cents, I'd buy one
of the new, large-screen iBooks, load up MS Office for OS X, and be
fat, dumb and happy.  (I've already got at least one of those
characteristics down, as it is.)

> it even get's PHB's going if you incorporate pretty headers.

Er, I'm being dense here, but "PHB's"?

> You can replace the save icon & menuitem to save in a different default
> format.

My first reaction to this was that changing the default behavior of
their software, even for only some documents, would not endear me to
my colleagues.  But this might be the way to make it easy on myself.
Thanks for the suggestion.

Sorry to chew your ears off.  Now I really will pipe down.

Best regards,
Michael

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