[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[martin yazdzik]

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 10:15 -0400, Sunny Dubey wrote:


> 
> My experience has been that copy/pasting is the single biggest cause of 
> formatting gone wrong.  Microsoft Office and OpenOffice seem hell bent on 
> preserving the original formatting of the copy/pasted text regardless of the 
> conventions and formatting of the new document.  Thus when people do paste 
> their work onto the shared document, you have that smörgåsbord of bad 
> formatting.



Believe it or not, that is not even something most of us who are not
professional secretaries consider.  I just presume that the pasted stuff
either stays the same or doesn't and if I want "my" fonts, I just shade
it out and fart around with it.  This leads me to believe that Henning
may be right in that what we, the non-geek non secretarial e u want is
some sort of neutral place to enter text and have the programme style
it.

It seems that the casual user or the boss typing a brief after the
typing pool has gone home has two bad choices - use something like
abiword, with minimal formatting, which is not suitable for some
documents, or ruin the .odt or .doc.  

Question, since I am not really familiar with how this works under the
hood:

would it not be better for ms to adopt the odt standard?

Also, the "frames" part of oo is great for professionals, but a nuisance
for the rest of us, as, for example, if I open a .doc made in oo with
abiword, it looks terrible, or koffice .odts are missing some form of
something that oo wants, as they lose parts of formatting and so on.

So the two issues are really not all that different, we need a simple
way to write documents wherein the super word processor can add whatever
he feels but the hunt and peck lawyer can edit the same doc, and this
way has to look and act the same on any mac, pc, unix or linux variant
of the programme.


This does not sound all that difficult.  Frankly, why do the oo people
enable numbering by default, when, if the super secretary want it he can
add it, whereas for me to eradicate the nuisance is hours on newsgroups?

It is always better to start simple and add, like four wheels and a
chassis, rather than deal with "packages" that some or many may not
want.

Regards to all,

Martin
"You are never not a physician".  -Scharfstein