“You’ve built a linux desktop. You’ve mounted the learning curve to configure the hardware (or paid someone else to do so) and you are able to do your own work on the machine. You’ve discovered that if you can point and click you can run a modern linux OS on your desktop. But how is it you will ever relate to the rest of the world? What do you do with the MS attachments people send you? How do you enjoy the music distributed in formats for a Windows World?”
…this isn’t another “you linux users are all losers, communists and freaks” article. Some useful info therein.
I mean, come on, everyday you have to send e-mail to people to send in another format, and the say they only have this format. If I want to print a billboard, no partner will accept if it’s not a Corel Draw file. Most proposal come as HTML e-mail with a company logo next to the sales rep signature, and with a .doc attachment. Your friends send you YouTube links to watch Flash videos, you have to reply and say “Please don’t send me this kind of e-mail anymore, as I only have an old version of Flash, and my OS can’t upgrade to Flash Player 9, others send you wmv videos, and you have to say “sorry, I didn’t install the mplayer codecs, I won’t be able to watch the video”. And there’s this customer who sends you his zipped .psd Photoshop file for you to get his logo. You name it…
With Linux you feel alone until you ditch it. And you feel stupid when you tell people you can’t open a Photoshop file or when you say than your Word document is all messed up. People don’t understand, they don’t know about Linux. When I used to tell them that I used Linux, they all would say they didn’t know what that was. Anyway, for these people that hear about Linux for the first time and find out nothing works on Linux, this is pretty good promotion: Don’t use Linux if you still want your Office documents to look good.
I mean, come on, everyday you have to send e-mail to people to send in another format, and the say they only have this format.
Send PDF. Problem solved.
If I want to print a billboard, no partner will accept if it’s not a Corel Draw file.
Insanity. PDF can solve this too. Or run CD under Wine/Cedega. Altogether idiotic.
Most proposal come as HTML e-mail with a company logo next to the sales rep signature, and with a .doc attachment.
Send a message back, ask for PDF. Do this enough times, people will get the message. Respond in kind.
Your friends send you YouTube links to watch Flash videos, you have to reply and say “Please don’t send me this kind of e-mail anymore, as I only have an old version of Flash, and my OS can’t upgrade to Flash Player 9, others send you wmv videos, and you have to say “sorry, I didn’t install the mplayer codecs, I won’t be able to watch the video”
So install the codecs. Also, I’ve never had trouble with Youtube videos on my machines, they seem to use Flash 6/7. Flash 9 is on its way, if Adobe is to be believed. IMHO, Flash is a great technology with poor platform support – and its use on most web sites for hyper-annoying advertisements makes me hate it.
And there’s this customer who sends you his zipped .psd Photoshop file for you to get his logo. You name it…
So, another vertical application that isn’t on Linux, but doesn’t matter a whole lot in general, since you could ask them to re-send in TIFF or PDF format. Or specify that off the bat.
Sounds like you’re in the print industry.
With Linux you feel alone until you ditch it.
Please.
And you feel stupid when you tell people you can’t open a Photoshop file or when you say than your Word document is all messed up.
Please. Why would you feel stupid? You figure everyone thinks you can burn money to own a legitimate Photoshop or Office copy? Only if you’re running a business with the software are you likely to have that kind of money. Legally speaking.
When I used to tell them that I used Linux, they all would say they didn’t know what that was.
Why even bother? Just request a file format that is more general, such as PDF, TIFF, etc.
Don’t use Linux if you still want your Office documents to look good.
Cripes.
“No, use Internet Explorer, as our web site is designed for Internet Explorer”, and I said “Sorry, I don’t have Internet Explorer on my system”.
I have personally convinced two banks to fix their web sites. Usually it’s a case of the bank going to the site developer and saying “WTF ARE YOU DOING TO MY CUSTOMERS, ASSWIPE?” There is precisely zero credibility for any developer that says they can’t make a commerce web site work without ActiveX.
Make a big stink. I mean, huge. After all, what if IE7 breaks those sites, too? It probably will.
If they are government web sites, you have every right to freak out and go griping right up the chain of command to the top.
Are you stupid?
Send PDF. Problem solved.
How will you send an office document as a PDF if the recipient can’t edit it? How will you send a video in PDF?
Insanity. PDF can solve this too.
No, none of them will print a billboard from a PDF. I know my job.
Send a message back, ask for PDF
You can do it all your life. I got tired.
you could ask them to re-send in TIFF or PDF format.
I could, but how can I edit a logo saved as PDF?
Just request a file format that is more general, such as PDF
Most people only have Acrobat Reader, and can’t export as PDF (They don’t use OpenOffice).
I have personally convinced two banks to fix their web sites.
Maybe. I’m sceptical.
>How will you send an office document as a PDF if the
>recipient can’t edit it? How will you send a video in
>PDF?
I can edit .doc files in openoffice, resave theme and send them to opeople who can re-open them in MS Office without many problems, hence even MS office to MS office gives a problem sometimes.
>No, none of them will print a billboard from a PDF.
>I know my job.
Strange job, strange printer, i work in the graphic industry for over 15 years now and PDF is all we work with. Coreldraw is not even been taking seriously..
Its Indesign or Quark or Freehand..not Coreldraw.
>Most people only have Acrobat Reader, and can’t
>export as PDF (They don’t use OpenOffice).
Now this is a real valid point!
>I could, but how can I edit a logo saved as PDF?
Ever heard of editable PDF?
Nice try…
Are you stupid?
Sometimes I wonder.
How will you send an office document as a PDF if the recipient can’t edit it? How will you send a video in PDF?
How often do you send documents that are to be edited? For me, almost never, unless I’m sending to myself. If you need to edit them, then you need the same software on both ends – the OS platform is IRRELEVANT.
PDF can be edited, FYI.
As for video, who in their right mind would send video in a .doc file? Crazy talk.
No, none of them will print a billboard from a PDF. I know my job.
Their loss. There’s no reason they couldn’t, but EPS will probably solve the problem completely.
You can do it all your life. I got tired.
It’s obvious reading your posts that you tire easily.
I could, but how can I edit a logo saved as PDF?
If you’re editing, use TIFF. Problem solved.
Most people only have Acrobat Reader, and can’t export as PDF (They don’t use OpenOffice).
Yet they expect you to own Office and Photoshop? Please.
Maybe. I’m sceptical.
Don’t be. I own an ISP and maybe my arguments are more convincing, particularly the one where I won’t turn off a transparent web proxy (saves about 60% of the http packet count across the egress and about 20% of the data while providing better speed) and neither would any of my ISP peers. If you can believe, one of them was trying to use tcp port 80 with a proprietary stateful protocol requiring ActiveX so that people could use their banking online. I had a party call with the developer, the operations manager and it manager and I’ve love to be a fly on the wall when I proved that the developer was incompetent enough to say “nobody users macintoshes” when the operations manager was sitting in front of one.
Anyway…
Edited 2006-08-21 20:52
It’s obvious reading your posts that you tire easily.
(except of trolling Linux-friendly or -neutral sites, obviously)
Heheheh. Nice one!
Go ahead and use office for critical communications to me and I will know even the part you didn’t want me too see. I have more than once gotten hidden and passworded pages in MS Office to print just fine using OOo. I myself use PDF for just such a reason – the only part that goes to the other person is the pages I export – no chance of them getting information that I did not want them to see.
Using a DOC file is both lazy and a bad habit that should be avoided or sooner or later it will come back to bite you.
One fix for this….
Send the Widows user a truly safe letter in the ODF format and tell them there is something they really want to see in it – and then tell your Windows counterparts where to get the nifty “FREE” reader and editor for this format. Believe me – they will download and install it in a heartbeat most Windows users are like that.
One note here: as a commercial systems administrator I have used proxies and contentfiltering to protect my networks from the nasties out there – and will not allow any exceptions so if your site must use ActiveX not even the Windows users here will us it!!!
My take on this artical is saying that “I want to be lazy and stupit like everyone else.”
OK.. If you are in Print have them send a PS file… That works on everything. Or you can have them send you the actual image. Anything sent in any “office” format at the plant I know gets sent right back…
There are plenty of free PDF creators out there.. in fact pdfcreator is called one.
You can edit TIFF. You can edit PS as well.
Most banks run a unix somewhere.. They will make their site work if you ask…
You can edit TIFF
You can’t work with a TIFF. It’s an image format, not a vector format where you can change text, increase the logo indefinately without loss of quality. But our ISP worker doesn’t know the difference between bitmaps and vectors, so that’s it for now.
You can’t work with a TIFF. It’s an image format, not a vector format where you can change text, increase the logo indefinately without loss of quality.
That’s some pretty serial thinking, there. I never said anything about vector graphics images. For that, you obviously can’t export to TIFF (well, you can, but that isn’t a good idea).
You could always use SVG, EPS, PS. Most vector graphics packages will support those cleanly. Hell, even my Amiga 2000 supported PS files back in… uh… 1990?
Edited 2006-08-22 03:00
//You could always use SVG, EPS, PS. Most vector graphics packages will support those cleanly.//
AFAIK there is precious little support for SVG on Windows.
You would probably have to use a FOSS application like Inkscape to be able to use SVG on Windows.
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape
There are some very good tools for converting bitmap graphics for vector graphics. Obviously there’s manual tweaking involved, but it’s not as onerous as one would think. Inkscape’s tracing (http://www.inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html) facility with a little script to pre-filter the bitmap works great. However, there are dedicated OCR and tracing tools that are more configurable.
crossover office runs photoshop, corel graphics suite, and office xp
install win32codecs and that solves pretty much all your problems.
as far as i know flash player 9 installes in crossover office as well but i haven’t tried it.
PDFs are editable. Adobe has a formidable business built around that, actually. However, the OP didn’t mention videos — of which I’ve never found a format that didn’t play with Linux, perhaps you’ve never tried. In fact, I encode a lot of video for Windows and Mac users and it’s frustrating to see how fussy those two platform’s default players are and how few codecs are available to them by default (albeit, under Linux you might have to do a ‘apt-get codecs’).
Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw both can load PDF and edit it, print it, make color seps, etc. Most large format printing firms look for Illustrator files (AI), of which PDF is merely a terse representation.
In Windows or on a Mac, PDF logos can be editted using Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, and others. In Linux, the GIMP can load PDFs and manipulate them in bitmap form, and various SVG apps can open PDFs in vector form — I believe Xara does as well. You also have the option of running CorelDraw under Linux (I don’t know about Illustrator).
You can provide people with a freeware PDF creation option (namely, “print to PDF”). Most graphic programs (like CorelDraw, Illustrator, and Freehand) also export to PDF.
Please, don’t feed the trolls! 🙂
Send a message back, ask for PDF. Do this enough times, people will get the message. Respond in kind.
The only one who would be ‘getting the message’ is my boss, then I’d be out on the street. Sometimes, you just don’t have a lot of control over the file formats being sent to you. I mean, it’s great if you’re living in your parents’ basements still .. then you can demand that people send whatever format you want. But for those in the real world, that’s not always an option.
So, if you have guts enough to request a change in corporate procedure, you’re suddenly in your parents’ basement, as opposed to just rolling over and taking it? You must be fun at parties. And if I recall, aren’t we ALL in the “real world”? I mean, make your points, but let’s remember that everyone is in a unique position in life if one looks closely enough. Your specific problems aside (office politics, inertia, etc.), there ARE viable options in Linux.
Please go out from your garage/basement for a while. You need to interact with ordinary people.
And there’s this customer who sends you his zipped .psd Photoshop file for you to get his logo.
In addition to Shaman’s rebuttal, psd files can be loaded and saved with either Gimp and Inkscape, both cross platform applications.
In addition to Shaman’s rebuttal, psd files can be loaded and saved with either Gimp and Inkscape, both cross platform applications.
Good to know. It’s been years since I did print or web design, and I guess it’s showing.
//I mean, come on, everyday you have to send e-mail to people to send in another format, and the say they only have this format. If I want to print a billboard, no partner will accept if it’s not a Corel Draw file. Most proposal come as HTML e-mail with a company logo next to the sales rep signature, and with a .doc attachment. Your friends send you YouTube links to watch Flash videos, you have to reply and say “Please don’t send me this kind of e-mail anymore, as I only have an old version of Flash, and my OS can’t upgrade to Flash Player 9, others send you wmv videos, and you have to say “sorry, I didn’t install the mplayer codecs, I won’t be able to watch the video”. And there’s this customer who sends you his zipped .psd Photoshop file for you to get his logo. You name it…
With Linux you feel alone until you ditch it. And you feel stupid when you tell people you can’t open a Photoshop file or when you say than your Word document is all messed up. People don’t understand, they don’t know about Linux. When I used to tell them that I used Linux, they all would say they didn’t know what that was. Anyway, for these people that hear about Linux for the first time and find out nothing works on Linux, this is pretty good promotion: Don’t use Linux if you still want your Office documents to look good.//
Sigh!
Use the “big daddy” version of this:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/page.php?7
It will install very easily (heck, you don’t even have to install it, it will run right off the CD). You will have absolutely no trouble using it if you can also use Windows. You will have no trouble with formats either, except the venerable Corel draw format which surely no-one uses any more?
What is wrong with PDF anyway for printing – oh, I forgot, MS Office doesn’t export to pDF does it?
Not to worry, I can use OpenOffice to export to PDF, and I can print to PDF via CUPS on Linux. Any decent print house will happily print my PDF for me.
Your comments are kind of silly. If you want to have a billboard printed, Clear Channel wants AI or something Illustrator can open — of which there are numerous choices under Linux. CorelDraw? You’ve got to be kidding.
HTML e-mail works fine. I’ve never had problems opening Word docs in OOo2 that I didn’t have using mismatched versions of Word (and, if you had to, you could run Word under Linux). And YouTube? I don’t know what you’re talking about — I watch stuff on YouTube under Linux all the time.
PSD files — at least GIMP works with them, dunno about other apps.
That’s not to say there can’t be instances when there are potential format compatibility issues, but generally speaking nothing you mentioned in your post applies.
A better rule of thumb would be: if you want your documents to look consistent, make sure to open them with the same application, version, and patch level as the one you saved it with — or save it as PDF. And remember: Microsoft Word is NOT a page layout tool, the document is not guaranteed to load the same way on another machine, and even a print driver can force word to reformat the page.
I forgot: Imagine the face of people who used to tell me “No, use Internet Explorer, as our web site is designed for Internet Explorer”, and I said “Sorry, I don’t have Internet Explorer on my system”. People don’t understand how it is possible not to have Internet Explorer, and they say “They you’ll have to use another computer to use our web site”. These are not any web sites, these are bank web sites, government web sites, which basically are unaccessible to declare your yearly earnings or to view your bank statement if you don’t use Windows. I haven’t stopped arguing with these companies and emailing CIOs. This is not going to change any time soon. That’s life.
I’ve one more time been modded down for telling the truth. Doesn’t matter. What had to be said has been said.
You were modded down for trolling, which your account was, (to be blindingly obvious), created for the express purpose of doing.
Honestly, I found your posts readable, but please don’t ever claim “the truth.” It bugs the crap out of me.
In cases like this I’ve been able to _barely_ scrape by with something like ie4linux (http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html). Easy setup and whatnot too.
Still a hassle though to see the “Recommended Internet Explorer and 1024×768 because we can’t develop sites properly”.
Change takes a long time, but it would take a lot less time if people didn’t just sit back and take crap.
Enter “Codeweavers CrossOver Office”.
Buy it, load IE6 and then load your Bank’s website.
Sure, you have to pay for it, but you have to pay for Windows as well (not to mention almost every other app you will ever use with it), and COO is much cheaper.
I use Linux all the time to access my banks stuff using firefox. If your bank doesn’t support the tools you use to manage your finances, find another bank, same with any service. I live in Canada, and I have never seen a government website not support firefox, though to be fair, we are a lot more progressive up here in the Great White North, so that could be just the way the ball bounces
I live in Canada, and I have never seen a government website not support firefox, though to be fair, we are a lot more progressive up here in the Great White North
I believe that all banks in Canada have supported Firefox and work in Linux, for the last couple of years, this may be because there is a bigger usage of Firefox here than in the US. Alternatively it could be because they are sensible enough to regard Active-X as a threat to their customers security.
Yes Goverment web sites all support Firefox but remember we did have to fight to get the online census website to support Linux, but of course we won. Good eh?
I have one gripe against government non support for Linux. At the Revenue Canada (or whatever the idiots in Ottawa have renamed the ministry to now) website they have a program for calculating the tax returns on employees for samll businesses, it is called TOD. Though it is written in Java it is distributed only as non cross platform Windows or Mac versions. I have sent in a complaint but it has not got very far. I don’t know if there are similar instances of discrimination against Linux users by government.
I was thing of treating it as a human rights issue under the Canadian Charter and starting a campaign but I never got the time.
Nice try, but every online banking website I’ve used in the past three years (Regions, AmSouth, my local FNB) are all Firefox-friendly and OS-independent. As for taxes, well H&R Block’s online tax prep portal has been Mozilla-friendly for many years, and the IRS gives everything out in PDF format. Every major online retailer (Amazon, eBay, NewEgg, overstock.com, etc.) is browser-independent and have been for many, many years. Every major web portal (Yahoo!, Google, even MSN) are browser-independent. Need I go on?
I seriously doubt any bank or government website out there is IE-only, and I see from your other posts you don’t dare mention the ones you claim issues with. I guess you didn’t realize that browser dependence has virtually disappeared from the commercial and government areas of the web in recent years. Or maybe you do, and have nothing else to complain about.
The Suntrust web site’s BillPay feature doesn’t require IE, but it also doesn’t recognize any Mozilla variants as being acceptable browsers (and won’t let you in).
Just FYI…
If it’s just a browser id problem you could use Opera (not sure if Firefox has such a feature) and change the Browser Identification option.
You can find it in (Opera 9) Tools->Quick Preferences->Edit site preferences->Network->Browser Identification.
If it’s just a dumb script not allowing any browsers other than IE you may be able to cheat it that way?
Haven’t tried it myself but I guess it’s worth a shot. I think.
My bank, First Internet Bank, https://firstib.com/ used to put up annoying warnings that I was using an unsupported browser (but it always worked well in Firefox anyway). I complained to them and they responded that yes, a lot of people are complaining. Now the annoying messages are gone!
Tell them you are following Department of Homeland Security Internet access guidelines which endorse using alternative browsers. Tell them corporate policy prohibits use of IE. Tell them IE was pooched by a Windows Update patch gone awry.
Heck, tell them you’re accessing their site through a mobile device — just like most of their other customers.
Designing a site for IE is egregiously foolish in this age of embedded browsers. How do you expect your Symbian-based flat panel in your fridge to access their site? The gall!
I started slowly replacing Windows programs with OSS programs, starting with IE to Firefox, then AIM to GAIM, Office to OOo.
whenever I could use something that existed on Linux AND windows, I used that. it was a bit of a slow migration but now I can have a mixed environment.
Everything works if you give it time, and moreso, have a need. I had a need to have something free and workable, after my OEM windows XP Home Edition started failing WGA I knew it was time to find a new OS.
I’ve got 2 copies of Windows XP Pro, they are the last copies of Windows I will ever buy, I’ve got 9 PC’s, 6 Run Linux, 2 run windows and 1 is a Mac.
“I’ve got 9 PC’s, 6 Run Linux, 2 run windows and 1 is a Mac.”
Man after my own heart… 🙂
[quote]
Don’t use Linux if you still want your Office documents to look good.
[/quote]
Personnaly, you shouldn’t be sending .doc files anyway unless it’s for collaboration.
If you want to send something, send plain text, or if formatting is important, send a .pdf.
The problem is marketing hype (of the MS variety) and end-user lazyness.
Besides, MS Office is not known for preserving formatting between different versions of MS Office, either. Although, I will admit that MS Office docs are known for excessive bloat (especially if you want to know what changes have occured to the document).
Personnaly, you shouldn’t be sending .doc files anyway unless it’s for collaboration.
Ok, go tell everybody. Most people send .doc because this is the only format they know. Word, Excel and PowerPoint. That’s it.
The problem is marketing hype (of the MS variety) and end-user lazyness.
Marketing hype, maybe. end-user lazyness, no. People don’t have time to go figure if there is an alternative to Office. They use what works for them. Computers give them enough headaches, no need to reinvent the wheel, they may think. Maybe they guess there is only MS Office and that there is just no competition at all.
It’s easy enough for you to say ‘you shouldn’t be sending .doc files anyway’ but when applying for jobs they often want me to email my CV to them, if I do this in any other way than a .doc created in Microsoft Word 2004 it will count against me. It will either look wonky and badly laid out when they open it or just not work at all if I were to sent it in .odt or other formats.
People expect .doc, it is annoying but a fact for a large number of people.
.odf/.odt is just as inappropriate as .doc as a distribution format. Write your CV in whatever program you like, export to PDF, and email. No one in the world has an excuse for not being able to read PDFs, and it preserves your document against accidental changes made by those who are reading it. There are free PDF authoring solutions in Linux and Mac OS X. I have no experience with Windows.
Don’t use windows myself either, but the ‘no excuse not to’ argument does not work when someone is expecting a word document.
Ideally it wouldn’t be necesary but in the UK at least for any business that does not deal with printing or publishing .pdf is just going to get blank looks from the person receiving it and they will ask the question ‘Why can’t this guy do it in Word?’
Then someone else will send in a nicely formatted word doc and prove by doing this he can do very nicely laid out documents in the word processor the entire company uses.
That’s well and good if the company is hiring him as a secretary or other office drone whose main job consists of typing in MS Word all day. On the other hand, browse any online job search engine and you’ll notice that while pretty much every company accepts .doc CVs, most of them also accept .html, .pdf and plain text. Even the almighty Google Inc. prefers text files to .docs.
As a part-time web designer, I wouldn’t think of sending a .doc CV to a potential client/employer; I’d instead point them to an online CV done in xhtml/css that would be representative of the work I’d be doing for them.
It’s all in the job you’re going for; if all they want is an MCSE/MCSD, they wouldn’t be impressed with the fact that you run Linux and FOSS software exclusively anyway and I doubt many FOSS supporters would want a MS-centric job. Yes, I know that for many of us, we’ll take what we can get. I’m sure, however, that any reasonably techie employer will certainly accept plain text or .pdfs and judge the prospective employee based on their experience and background rather than their favorite file format.
It’s easy enough for you to say ‘you shouldn’t be sending .doc files anyway’ but when applying for jobs they often want me to email my CV to them, if I do this in any other way than a .doc created in Microsoft Word 2004 it will count against me. It will either look wonky and badly laid out when they open it or just not work at all if I were to sent it in .odt or other formats.
People expect .doc, it is annoying but a fact for a large number of people.
If your cv is so heavily formatted that it doesn’t translate well from odf to doc, then you’re probably getting too funky with it which is bad design for a resume anyways.
However, one point about this is that a lot of companies insisting on .doc are actually dumping the files into automated tools designed for filtering, distilling and archiving information from resumes. Often times it’s not actually viewed in hardcopy and formatting is stripped off. It’s a drag that these companies insist on formatted documents when simple txt or rtf would suit their purposes. Hell, they’re one step away from simply requesting raw xml to make things easy, in a lot of cases they have a web interface allowing people to apply online anyways. All gets dumped into the same database.
But for these companies, I’ll agree that .pdf or other formats are not an option, but I don’t think an OpenDoc to doc conversion would be unacceptable either.
When you apply for jobs you give them what they want or you don’t get it.
Also just about everything I apply for is small companies, no online applications, no huge centralised HR department. Just a guy who wants a file to open in his word processor, which is Microsoft Word, because that is standard.
The point being in business Word is standard, and if you deviate it counts against you.
My CV is only formatted in bullet points, tabs and indents for paragraphs, nothing fancy at all. I still get no luck if I keep it any other word processor and try to export to .doc
My CV is only formatted in bullet points, tabs and indents for paragraphs, nothing fancy at all. I still get no luck if I keep it any other word processor and try to export to .doc
Then yours is a non-issue; Microsoft Wordpad will do everything you need for your CV, and will save in a .doc format readable by any version of Word likely to exist on your potential employer’s computer.
On the Linux side, KWord, AbiWord, and OOo will all do the same as Wordpad in your specific case. In fact, I’d bet that any word processor capable of saving in .doc format could do what you need. Bullets, tabs and indents are basic ingredients in any word processor; anything less is a text editor.
AFAIK Wordpad, and certainly some versions of “MSWord” supplied as the cut-down version in Works, write RTF documents with a .doc extension! (Try opening one on a Gnome desktop by just clicking on the file – it will give you the gypsy’s warning – “…the extension on this file does not match the filetype. If yopu still wish to open this file right-click on the file and select a program from the drop-down menu” or somesuch. It will then open.) These files open without comment in MSWord.
So the simple answer to submitting .doc files from Linux? Save as RTF – rename from stuff.rtf to stuff.doc – send. It should work (I haven’t tried it because I have never had any problems reported back to me from OO.o’s “save as .doc” – even with opening files, editing them, and returning them from whence they came – but if there are images I use PDF.)
In any case, there seem to be a lot of very ill-equipped Windows boxes in various offices. I received a panic phone call from one guy I sent some TIFFs, (he requested TIFFs) because I had zipped them in a folder! He had to call in IT support to unzip them! So filetypes aren’t just a Linux problem, it would seem.
EDIT – typos only (I seem incapable of spelling “Linux” today).
Edited 2006-08-22 10:53
Well, when I applied for a job at IBM some time ago, I created my resumé at OpenOffice, asked a friend to open it on MS Office just to check if everything was alright and then sent it right away.
Please keep in mind that they have a Word template that you need to fulfill with your personal data and even then, the amount of formatting lost was zero, nada.
Needless to say, I got the job. 🙂
Just my $0.02…
Big problem with doc file is the incompatibily from each version of MS Word. If you send a MS 2003 doc file to a business that only use MS Office 2000, you won’t get any response because the former will be totally unreadable for the latter. So the best method to preserve the format is to send either text format or pdf.
As I touched on in another post:
If you are stuck with Windows but cannot afford Word, use Wordpad. It saves in an older version of Word (’97 I believe) that is fully readable in any later incarnation, and if you really need the more advanced features of Word for a CV, I’d say you’re overdoing it.
If you are lucky enough to run OOo, AbiWord or KWord, they all can save in Word 2000 format, again readable by any current version of Word.
This is a non-issue folks; .doc is perhaps the easiest Windows file format to work with in Linux. The true obstacles are vertical market software, such as law enforcement management software, medical billing software, etc.
//If you are stuck with Windows but cannot afford Word, use Wordpad.//
If you are stuck with Windows but cannot afford Word, use AbiWord. It works in Windows too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiword
http://www.abisource.com/
//t saves in an older version of Word (’97 I believe) that is fully readable in any later incarnation//
Err, no. Wordpad saves to RTF format but just gives the file a .doc extension.
Abiword, for exactly the same price as Wordpad (which is $0), will read and save proper .doc files and it will also read and save ODF.
http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/abi-win32.jpg
It has an extensible plugin architecture which supports import and export to a lot of different formats:
http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/PluginMatrix
Beautiful. All of that for a 5.1 MByte download.
http://www.abisource.com/downloads/abiword/2.4.5/Windows/abiword-se…
Apparently you only read the first paragraph I wrote. I also wrote (emphasis added):
If you are lucky enough to run OOo, AbiWord or KWord, they all can save in Word 2000 format, again readable by any current version of Word.
Not everyone can install AbiWord at work. I certainly can’t; even if I tried to run the executable only, I’d get a severe tongue-lashing from IT. It was implied in my post that if you don’t have Word and can’t use anything else, use WordPad. If you can use an OSS alternative, by all means do so, as you will have much better results.
//even if I tried to run the executable only, I’d get a severe tongue-lashing from IT.//
While I have no doubt that this is the case, I have never understood this attitude.
Abiword is open source. Your IT dept can (or should be able) to tell for themselves that it has no undesirable functions within it. The fact that anyone else can also look at the code only lends significant support to that conclusion.
There must be a lot of ignorance in a lot of the IT departments of this world.
I should have clarified that it’s a local government job, and our IT department consists of two MCSE-types and two gophers.
They actually sent out an email last year to all county employees stating that using free antivirus programs on their personal computer at home, namely AVG and Avast, can infect the user’s computer with “malware contained in those underground programs”. Never mind that AVG and Avast are full-blown, professional solutions for businesses. Never mind that the antivirus that our county uses is Symantec Corporate, which earlier this year was found to contain a major rootkit vulnerability.
These guys are total idiots, but they have no worries about losing their jobs due to their utter incompetence as they got the jobs politically in the first place. They’re here to stay, and we are the ones who suffer with inadequate support and a draconian workday.
//Big problem with doc file is the incompatibily from each version of MS Word. If you send a MS 2003 doc file to a business that only use MS Office 2000, you won’t get any response because the former will be totally unreadable for the latter. So the best method to preserve the format is to send either text format or pdf.//
Or you could use OpenOffice. It reportedly has better support for many legacy MS Office documents than current versions of MS Office itself does.
I’m a translator / copy writer and last year I told all my customers that from January 1st 2006 I would be on Linux only.
I actually hoped to scare some customers away
but alas, so such luck. No format problems whatsoever when it comes to text processing.
Hey another copywriter that uses Linux. I wrote about my experience in The Linux Journal April 2003.
Good to know that another copywriter has good tastes in the tools they choose!
MS attachments people send you? How do you enjoy the music distributed in formats for a Windows World?”
Open em in openoffice, play em in mplayer or kaffine
OS-X and Windows are the only OS’s that can do daily tasks and as long as the trolls keep saying this it will be true. Linux is still a command line OS, but it’s funny you can still write a cv and send it by email.
I mean how do we Linux users even work?, maybe it’s this myth that we can actually do all the things Windows users can do. Atleast I can wobble my windows. 🙂
Never did find where he talked about the music. Only got through half the article before I lost interest.
I use Openoffice on both Linux, Windows and FreeBSD, and I have to say I only had one time where it messed anything up, and that was with a document that had a table that was so fiendish in it’s nesting that It made my eyes hurt, other than that, I have never had any issues. When it comes to office suites, Openoffice has what it takes to beat MS Office.
Considering that many email servers strip doc files from email due to viruses, sending them out is a really bad idea. Not to mention MS’s bad habit of changing the format with each version of Office. Docs just need to be gone. pdf’s are so much better and the new odf is going to become standard even on windows i think. Kind of like mp3 is standard, even though better codecs have come out.
I dunno. It depends entirely upon “reach”; that is, the degree to which applications target the format. The really nice thing about PDF is that it was intended to be used as a fixed-page document format — and it did it pretty well. But you have to create these documents somehow. Most users are familiar with MS Office, not OO. But will MS Office support ODF in-the-box? I doubt it. You’ll probably have to download some plug-in in order to export to ODF. Which means that the vast majority of users aren’t going to use ODF. They’ll probably use MS’s OpenXML, instead, which calls into question whether ODF will be the next PDF.
Most users are familiar with MS Office, not OO. But will MS Office support ODF in-the-box? I doubt it.
Familiarity is not an issue because OpenOffice interface looks very similar to MS Office 2000. Users who know the basic functionality can use OpenOffice without difficulty. Beside, OpenOffice is not the only Word Processor to support ODF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software_comparison
You’ll probably have to download some plug-in in order to export to ODF. Which means that the vast majority of users aren’t going to use ODF. They’ll probably use MS’s OpenXML, instead, which calls into question whether ODF will be the next PDF.
Last month, Microsoft have announced they support ODF
http://kairosnews.org/microsoft-allows-open-document-format-for-sof…
If their Office product won’t support that format, they are risking themselves of losing moneys and end up to look like a total fool of themselves by not respecting customers’ requests.
Familiarity is not an issue because OpenOffice interface looks very similar to MS Office 2000. Users who know the basic functionality can use OpenOffice without difficulty. Beside, OpenOffice is not the only Word Processor to support ODF…
You missed the point. MS Word has over 90% market share in the word processor market. Word and .DOC format are the standards, not ODF. Few users are going to download an open-source plug-in for Word that allows them to export to ODF. So, the first time people receive an ODF file and can’t open it because they don’t have the plug-in, they’re not going to know how to open it up — and MS has little incentive to favor ODF over OpenXML.
If their Office product won’t support that format, they are risking themselves of losing moneys and end up to look like a total fool of themselves by not respecting customers’ requests.
MS can acquiesce to customer requests by offering the downloadable plug-in — but the plug-in is a second-class citizen and not supported in-the-box with MS’s OpenXML format. So, as a result, OpenXML has an automatic advantage over ODF. I’m not saying this because I want OpenXML to “win”. I’m saying it because the gravity of the market is against ODF.
You missed the point. MS Word has over 90% market share in the word processor market.
Among that statistic, which version of MS Word is the most used worldwide? Remember that just because they have a large market does not mean they will stay on top forever. For example, WordPefect used to be the most used word processor until it was overtaken by MS Word.
Word and .DOC format are the standards, not ODF.
De facto standard. Microsoft is still unwilling to provide a proper documentation for the competition thus a problem of vendor-lockin and a constant change of codes that break their own format. Try to open a Word 3.1 file to the newest MS Word.
Few users are going to download an open-source plug-in for Word that allows them to export to ODF. So, the first time people receive an ODF file and can’t open it because they don’t have the plug-in, they’re not going to know how to open it up — and MS has little incentive to favor ODF over OpenXML
Vendors will provide a detailed step for these users how to instal this kind of plugins. Users who works for say a government or a companies that adopted ODF as a standard will get the instructions about opening ODF file. This is not much different for the very first time very few users know how to get doc file way back then. As we speak, college/university, governement and company gradually switch to ODF. They are among the first to do transition then that will apply to the mass users.
Microsoft just try to preserve their lockin. Once again, you don’t listen to your customers, you are losing money.
Among that statistic, which version of MS Word is the most used worldwide?
Irrelevant. MS provides readers for all of its formats.
De facto standard.
Standards are dictated by what the industry actually uses, not by what some ISO org says. Hence, Word is the standard.
Vendors will provide a detailed step for these users how to instal this kind of plugins.
And since few people actually read software/computer documentation, you know where you can file that one.
//Word and .DOC format are the standards, not ODF.//
Point of order, that is simply not correct.
There is only one standard format for digitally-stored documents, and that is ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opendocument
Not quite.
If you are a Lawyer, WordPerfect is THE standard.
If you are a government worker in several states and countries, ODF is THE standard.
If you are an academic in math, physics, or certain types of engineering, LaTeX is THE standard.
If you are a web designer, HTML is THE standard.
It’s no doubt that Word is widely used, particularly in small businesses and at home. But it’s hardly a standard in the conventional sense in that different versions of Word don’t necessarily interoperate (there have been at least 5 distinct .DOC formats since 1995, all of which are still in use today, not including the Mac variants). DOC is fine for simple documents, but writing larger complex documents renders it very difficult to use / unstable. DOC also has a minor disadvantage that the format itself is provided under license from MS — you own rights to the content, yet they retain the rights to reading/writing it. They’ve played pretty nice so far, but they don’t have to.
//It depends entirely upon “reach”; that is, the degree to which applications target the format. The really nice thing about PDF is that it was intended to be used as a fixed-page document format — and it did it pretty well. But you have to create these documents somehow. Most users are familiar with MS Office, not OO. But will MS Office support ODF in-the-box? I doubt it. You’ll probably have to download some plug-in in order to export to ODF. Which means that the vast majority of users aren’t going to use ODF. //
For PDF capability on Windows, use this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
For ODF capability on Windows, use this:
http://www.openoffice.org/
… or if you don’t have a lot of bandwidth, use this:
http://www.abisource.com/
It is all free.
Applications already target both PDF and ODF. They are both cross-platform unencumbered standards.
//They’ll probably use MS’s OpenXML, instead//
Doesn’t exist. Vapourware.
If you really MUST use MS Office for whatever inane reason, PDF creator is OK and then use either this:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5139606687.html
or, God forbid, this:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1131017534;fp;16;fpid;0
if you really must and are desperate. The only problem is, the last two, just like Office 12, are vapourware.
Edited 2006-08-22 11:56
Does it take a PhD to write a program to access an ODF file, or is it an ASCII extension? It’s nice to grep documents.
It is absolutely easy to write an application which allows you to create, read or modify an ODF file.
The ODF file itself is just a zipped directory structure. In windows you can rename myDocu.odt to myDocu.zip and unzip the file with WinZip or any other zip tool you want. I once did that just for fun, it really works!
What you get is a directory structure where all the things are stored in ASCII (or unicode, I don’t know) XML. Embedded things like pictures are stored as png or jpeg files in subdirectories.
If you find out what which XML tag means and does (and this is publicly documented) you can write your own ODF modifying/creating/reading application. Free languages like python might even already provide toolchains for manipulating ODF files (although I know nothing definitively).
If you want to grep ODF documents in Linux you will likely find a way to write a simple shell script (named odfgrep
) which quickly searches through an ODF file.
In order to use Windows, save a lot of money yet still be cross-platform interoperable and likely future-proof, here is the way to go:
For a cross-platform interoperable Office suite on Windows, use OpenOffice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openoffice
=======
If that is a bit heavy for your (perhaps older) Windows machine or the download is too hefty, consider combining these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiword
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
… and if you want to create webpages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu
“consider combining these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiword
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
… and if you want to create webpages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu
”
Of course, I forgot one, namely Scribus:
http://www.scribus.net/
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=index
… supports PDF too.
http://docs.scribus.net/content/slideshow/gallery/screen11.jpg
All for free. Enjoy! Have a lot of fun.
Edited 2006-08-22 14:32
The title of the article should be using Microsoft Office documents in linux. Using linux in a windows world is very misleading. I was expecting to read about more based on the article title. Like linux in an active directory environment or linux filesharing in a windows domain or gaming or multimedia and the tons of other challenges linux has in the windows world.
Fortuantely,
the only *real* problem i got was, that i can’t do my work as a trainee at home. in business sometimes you simply have to code in visual basic. there’s a “support” in open office, but it is *really* crappy.
but i can understand why the oo developers do not support it, they support python (do i have to say anything else?).
(edit: i’ve read the related article about novell and vba by now and hope you will excuse repetition
than ms access *dot*
really not a big win and i don’t like it, but i’m only trainee ;(
anyway, it’s not supported. but why? i can install a free sql-server everywhere.
this is now the point? why should i develope a crappy solution, just to be compatible to ms?
this is the problem…
…and at home i write most of the time in groff. so my cv looks great
but mmmh… there’s NO doc import.
Edited 2006-08-22 15:23