Thinking about switching

[worker201]

I have to think about what works best for me.

The other day, I needed to print a Word document.  And when I say Word document, I mean the nastiest thing ever - floating table elements, background printing, the works.  At that time I had 3 programs on the Mac to try with.  Mariner Write, my no-nonsense word processor, wouldn't even open it.  Abi-Word and Pages opened it, but weren't able to correctly display many of the elements.  What I ended up doing was opening it with OpenOffice on the Windows computer and printing to PDF, and then printing the PDF from the Mac (network printer issues aren't solved yet).

The Win OpenOffice interpretation of the document wasn't perfect, but it was acceptable for my purposes.  The main reason I didn't use Mac OpenOffice is because the Leopard implementation of X11 broke OpenOffice.  However, while I wasn't looking, a native OSX app was released in October.  I downloaded it yesterday, and checked the evil document to see how it looked.  Unbelievably, it was not quite right.  I had the same document open in the same program, one on a Mac and one in Windows, and they were different.  This is a major issue.  I need to be able to view documents very precisely.  If people are going to be producing stuff like that with Word (the shouldn't, but that's another story), I might need to have Word available in some form.

There's also the Excel issue.  The program I use for school (and work after that) can process Excel files directly, with no issues.  But only if they are Excel files.  .xls files created in OpenOffice or some other spreadsheet don't work.  The only way to get an OpenOffice file to work is to create a headered ascii table, which is a couple extra steps outside the spreadsheet program.  I think this has to do with the program reading special proprietary embedded headers from the document, rather than interpreting the table itself and figuring out what to do - which is bad programming, but since the program only runs on Windows, they figured it was safe.

Thus, it looks like I might have to invest in Microsoft Office.  It's a damn travesty, but I don't see any other options.  I have to be able to view documents precisely.  And I need to have a spreadsheet that can be used to edit and create table files for ArcGIS.  OpenOffice has tried really hard to work as an Office replacement, and in many ways it outperforms Office.  But OpenOffice can't cover all aspects, and occasionally people get to the point where they have to choose between industry standards and personal politics.

Comments welcome.

[davidnix71]

http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/Dev_DEV300_m33/

has the downloads for the Aqua versions of OpenOffice. I don't see posts anywhere about how OO is broken in Leopard. I still use Tiger and have no problems. OO starts and runs much better than it used to. I also have done the Apple supplied X11 update.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/x11update2006113.html
This allows use of native fonts.

NeoOffice is free and native. http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

[Lead Head]

Were you running both OpenOffice 3.0.0 on both the Mac and the PC? The OSX PPC version seems to be version 2.4.0, while the x86 one is 3.0.0.

I have a copy of Office 2007 ultimate, that I got free (legally too) from Microsoft. It looks VERY out of place on XP, and is just completely different then any other app on XP, which makes it a bit annoying to use. But it integrates much much better on Vista and Windows 7 Beta

[worker201]

Ok, it turns out the Windows version I have is 2.4.  I'm downloading the 3.0 version now, so that I can verify the comparison.  However, if it displays the document the same way the Mac does, that will indicate that OpenOffice actually has lost some Word compatibility over the version change.

David, the last version of OpenOffice (2.4?) was not Leopard compatible.  It required X11, and the version of X11 shipped with Leopard was only half-working.  The XQuartz people have been working pretty hard on it, enough so that gimp now works great in Leopard, but OpenOffice support was hit or miss.  It worked in some versions of XQuartz, but not in others.  Now that OpenOffice has released a standalone binary, there is no issue.
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

[worker201]

Mmmkay, just finished installing OO 3.0 on the Windows machine.  The functionality is identical to the Mac now.  However, I'm not sure whether it is a flaw or not.  On closer inspection, it might be a non-printing character that I'm not familiar with.  It's a small red triangle in the lower left corner of a text box, but it cannot be selected or manipulated in any way.  If I export the document to PDF, or print, it does not appear in the output.  Weird.

But anyway, it does appear that OO might work out as a Word document reader.  Unfortunately, there are tons more crazy things that people can and do put into Word docs that I may have to deal with in the future, I might need to be sure.  And there's also the Excel compatibility issue to consider.

[Lead Head]

OpenOffice did make some good strides with Version 3.0. What version of Word are you using?

[worker201]

I currently don't own Word.  I am working with a Word document created by someone I don't know.  A someone who needs to learn InDesign or Quark!

[Lead Head]

Do you know what version of word it was created with? If its a newer one, such as Word 2003 or 2007, you might have more luck converting it to an older version like 2000

[worker201]

There is no way of finding out what version was used to create the document.  My guess is that it was 2005 or earlier - it was created by a municipal government (although they could contract out for document services).  However, since this document uses really deep magic to display things, it's understandable that it doesn't convert cleanly, and it probably wouldn't be readable in Word 2000.  Anyways, programs tend to be backward compatible, but never forward compatible.

[Lead Head]

What exactly is on this word doc, is just just charts and graphs?

[Aloone_Jonez]

If all you need to do is print/read a Word document then download Microsoft's freeware Word viewer program. It's built for Windows but runs under WINE on 'NIX systems.

The only problem is when you need to read a stubborn Word document, copy and paste from MS Word viewer sometimes works but it isn't perfect.

MS also supplies freeware viewers for Power Point and Excel - I use MS viewers to open MS Office documents all the time on all operating systems I use with no problems.

[worker201]

What exactly is on this word doc, is just just charts and graphs?

It's an application for employment.

[Refalm]

What exactly is on this word doc, is just just charts and graphs?

It's an application for employment.

So it's got a shitload of macro's?
That is a problem, since Openoffice hasn't got Visual Basic built-in, but their own Basic version which isn't entirely compatible.

[Calum]

i wonder why they do this with application forms for employment? i've seen that a lot too. Are they trying to say you can't work for them unless you paid your Microtax?

[worker201]

i wonder why they do this with application forms for employment? i've seen that a lot too. Are they trying to say you can't work for them unless you paid your Microtax?

Lol, probably not consciously.  I think it's more of an extension of the business environment that Microsoft created.  Companies get the idea that if they just buy Office, they'll never have to buy software again.  And so they use it for things it should not be used for.  Word is a decent word processor, but it is one of the crappiest page design programs ever made.  The kind of illegitimate tweaking you have to do to get a modern design is just insane - it's possible that the document wouldn't even open correctly in another version of Word.  But the small companies and municipalities that use it are kinda locked in, because they can't really justify the expense of purchasing a program that would do it properly.