Stop Microsoft
Miscellaneous => Applications => Topic started by: worker201 on 17 January 2009, 03:59
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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.
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http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/Dev_DEV300_m33/ (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 (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
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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
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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 (http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki)
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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.
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OpenOffice did make some good strides with Version 3.0. What version of Word are you using?
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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!
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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
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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.
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What exactly is on this word doc, is just just charts and graphs?
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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.
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What exactly is on this word doc, is just just charts and graphs?
It's an application for employment.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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If you open the doc in Hexedit or HexeditFAT, you should be able to read the header and know what version of Word it was created in.
If it has a damaged header, then it may not open properly in any program. But, with OO, you can force select a template when you open a doc,
if you think it's not what it was labeled.
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FWIW, I didn't get the job. And I was grossly over-qualified for it. :(
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Update: this is becoming more of an issue. I've been working on editing some documents these past few weeks - Word docs and PowerPoint shows. None of them have any weird formatting bullshit, or incompatible features. I save often, so I'm not losing any data. But every couple days, OpenOffice trys to update some French thesaurus and crashes. I think the Mac version is Java, and the whole runtime takes a dirtnap. 6 times in the past 2 weeks. The only other Java programs I have, Editra and Azureus/Vuze don't seem to have any problems. OpenOffice has been acceptable when it is working - but that is sadly not very often.
So I have arrived at a point where I have to seriously consider Microsoft Office. Again.
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Any possible way of uninstalling this french thesaurus component?
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Not that I can find.
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I'm assuming you have already tried doing a complete un-install of OpenOffice, then re-installing it?
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I'm assuming you have already tried doing a complete un-install of OpenOffice, then re-installing it?
It doesn't quite work that way on a Mac. But I did remove OpenOffice.app, and the support folders from /Library/ApplicationSupport. Then I installed a clean copy. Still tries to push the update. However, you can just tell it to cancel the update, and it won't try to download it. However, it does sit there, waiting with those puppy dog eyes, upset because you're ignoring it. Kinda like Windows with that little "I have to download Genuine Advantage!" whine. It doesn't crash the computer, but it is annoying as hell.
I think doing the whole thing in Java was a mistake.
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That thing was driving me crazy, so I started looking around. If you go to the Apple Store and look at the reviews for MS Office 2008, you will see a lot of angry people. I guess there's a lot of things about Office that royally suck. So I started looking around for other alternatives. I found two - Lotus Symphony and NeoOffice.
Lotus Symphony looks exactly like it does in Windows - I have it on my Windows computer. It's not extraordinary in Windows, but it gets the job done. The Mac version, though, sucks. I don't know what it was doing, but there was a short delay between key presses and letters appearing on the screen. Which is the kiss of death for a word processor. I think it was one of those features where it tries to anticipate what word you are typing, but it was doing it for 2 and 3 letter words, which eats up cycles like crazy if you can type 50 words per minute. Lotus Symphony is no good. Fortunately, it told me during installation where files were installed, so removing it from the computer shouldn't be too much trouble.
Next is NeoOffice. NeoOffice is a fork of OpenOffice from the 2.x vintage, but it doesn't look anything like OO. That must be because it was designed from the ground up to be a native Mac application - totally Aqua-fied. It also doesn't seem to offer any useless updates like OO, making this an ideal fix for me. I used NeoOffice to finish up a paper I was working on today, and it performed nicely. At one point, the NeoOffice window flashed to white and then came back again. It was only for a split-second, and it was coincided with Time Machine coming on. So it must have cached something somewhere. It was odd, but not as big a deal as a stupid French thesaurus update.
NeoOffice is not a universal binary, but they have an Intel version and a PPC version. The Intel version that you can download is v3.0, patch 0. Immediately upon install, it will ask you if you want to get patch 4. I guess you don't have to, but I did. So far, things are going great. I'm glad to have found an acceptable alternative to OpenOffice.
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- and ironically enough it is based off of (sort of) OpenOffice