Re: [PLUG] FYI: Open Office Review

["K.S. Bhaskar" <bhaskar@bhaskars.com>]

Aaraon --

OK, you put me on the spot.  Over the years, I have adopted some work
habits to avoid the quicksand.

0. If it has to look right (presentations to executives, customers), I
use M$Office.

1. You're right about the bullets.  I just chose some bullets that I
judged to be least intrusive on Windows, and people just assume I am
being eccentric in my choice of bullet, rather than concluding that I
am rightminded in my choice of computing platform.

2. I distribute documents in PDF.  I distribute in .doc only when I
need someone to be able to make edits.  PDF has another advantage -
someone can't inadvertently hit their laptop touch pads with the ball
of their thumb, chop out some part of my document and tell me I'm
stupid for overlooking something obvious.  Yes, PDF can be edited, but
sending out a document intended to be read but not updated keeps
honest people honest.

3. Page and line breaks can vary from one version of Windows to
another.  I use paragraph styles, section headers and widow and orphan
control so that the document looks OK even if the breaks change as
they go back and forth.  I also use Times New Roman, Arial and Courier
New when creating documents that are to be edited back and forth.

4. I avoid embedded objects and anything fancy like Yes/No voting
buttons.  [Pretending to be a Luddite, I just vote Yes/No by e-mail
reply if someone tries to send me a document with stuff like that.]

Basically, I follow the KISS principle.  Hope this helps.

Regards
-- Bhaskar

On Dec 4, 2007 10:13 PM, Aaron Mulder <ammulder@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2007 4:05 PM, K.S. Bhaskar <bhaskar@bhaskars.com> wrote:
> > Over the years, its formatting compatibility with M$Office is comparable to
> > that of one M$Office version with another.
> > ...
> > I use OOo on Linux in an S&:P 500 company (thousands of employees) that is
> > officially M$Office on Windows, and almost all the time no one notices the
> > difference.
>
> Really?  I've noticed that the bullets are consistently wrong.  As in,
> you create a bullet list in OO and load it in Word and the bullet
> icons are daggers or some other oddball character.  If by some miracle
> they appear as round dots, they're either larger or smaller than in
> the original.  It seems to happen both ways (created in Word and
> opened in OO or created in OO and opened in Word).  This has been a
> problem forever -- I don't know why getting bullets right is so hard.
> (I've never had a similar problem when going from one version of a
> product to another version of the same product on either side.)
>
> Also, the page spacing is typically not the same between OO and Word.
> That is, if the page ends on a certain line and word in one product,
> there's no guarantee that the same page will end in the same place on
> the other product.  So if you massage the document to make the page
> breaks look nice or just barely fit everything onto one page, it's all
> lost in the conversion.
>
> I use OO a lot, but I try to export to PDF wherever possible to avoid
> crap like this.  I also am a big fan of putting text in an e-mail or
> wiki page instead of a casual word processing document.  I'm actually
> still fairly grumpy about the OO/Word compatibility, since I use about
> 1% of the features and I still consistently notice these
> discrepancies.
>
> However, for what it's worth, I've been using OO on Linux and Mac for
> several years, and almost never had it crash (except when SuSE shipped
> a pre-release version once).  I'm not a big fan of the usability of
> Impress, but I have used it a lot without crashing-type problems.  On
> the other hand, I hate the stupid right-side window that always comes
> back from the dead, and I wish someone would explain how slide
> templates can be made to work (versus always using "Duplicate Slide").
>  I can't believe any of the OO developers actually give presentations!
>
> Thanks,
>       Aaron
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