Linked by lemur2 on Wed 22nd Jun 2011 22:30 UTC
The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.
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RE[4]: holding things back
by Dave_K on Sun 26th Jun 2011 05:10
in reply to "RE[3]: holding things back"
Member since:2005-11-16
The simple solution for this is for OpenOffice/LibreOffice users to save documents (meant for interchange with other parties) as MS Office legacy formats (.doc, .xls etc). MS Office 2K3 does have a reasonable ability to open documents in these legacy formats. No word salad then.
The handling of MS Office formats (legacy or otherwise) in OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not even close to being trustworthy. I tested this myself with OpenOffice not so long ago, using forms, manuals and training presentations in .doc and .ppt formats. These were all real world documents, mainly produced by the UK government.
Not a single one of them kept its formatting intact when opened in OpenOffice and saved back into an MS Office format. A couple of the .doc forms (a job application and grant funding proposal form IIRC) were badly mangled, with the formatting a mess and some of the content unreadable. One seemed to have been corrupted be the conversion, as it wasn't even possible to edit parts of it. The presentations lost various effects as well as having formatting issues.
Other documents were just mildly messed up, with formatting glitches and things out of alignment, but even that's unacceptable when documents are expected to be perfect. I'd have looked utterly unprofessional and incompetent if I'd worked on those documents in OpenOffice and sent them out without checking the results.
A even better solution is to export documents meant for interchange with other as PDF files.
That's not an option when people have specifically asked for work in a particular MS Office format.
RE[5]: holding things back
by bassbeast on Sun 26th Jun 2011 07:29
in reply to "RE[4]: holding things back"
Member since:2007-11-11
Thank you as that is EXACTLY what I was talking about! Not a single doc I saw mangled was saved in ODF, all were saved as .doc (the 97-2003 compatible setting I believe) in Open Office. I lost 15 points from a mangled Open Office doc, dropping the paper from an A to a C, and my oldest lost 10 points with the latest Libre office because of the same reason.
So it is as I said, if the ONLY thing you are doing is saving docs for your own use, or to print? Then FOSS Office Suites are fine. If you need to collaborate or heaven forbid send a resume (which BTW no HR dept will accept PDF, as their placement software uses keyword search that doesn't work on anything but .doc) to try to land your dream job? Do NOT use FOSS Office suites, as they WILL horribly mangle even the most simple formatting. It has gotten better than the days of OO.o 1.x-2.x but that is like saying your horse costs less to feed now that its dead.
If you are getting graded, or collaborating, or have any weight at all attached to a document? Buy MS Office, hell even the student edition will do. Because if you send a .doc done by Open/Libre Office it WILL look like garbage when opened in MS Office. Personally I wish it weren't so, as I give out libre Office on all new home builds and I hate how folks end up having to spend nearly $100 on Office Student just to get anything done, but ATM LO/OO just butchers the .doc format when opened in MS Office. If you don't believe me do as Dave K did above, download any reasonably complex doc from any government website, edit in LO/OO and then save as .doc and open in any MS Office. You'll see the thing gets all kinds of hosed.
RE[5]: holding things back
by lemur2 on Sun 26th Jun 2011 09:17
in reply to "RE[4]: holding things back"
Member since:2007-02-17
News
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The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.
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Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
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Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
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2007-02-17
The only way you will get this is if you save your document in OpenOffice as an ODF document.
If you re-open such a document in OpenOffice, or any other OpenDocument-capable oofice suite except MS Office, then it will be absolutely fine.
MS Office, however, makes word salad of such documents. This is a failing of MS Office, it has piss-poor interoperability.
The simple solution for this is for OpenOffice/LibreOffice users to save documents (meant for interchange with other parties) as MS Office legacy formats (.doc, .xls etc). MS Office 2K3 does have a reasonable ability to open documents in these legacy formats. No word salad then.
A even better solution is to export documents meant for interchange with other as PDF files.
If you were interested in offering people decent advice, this is what you would tell them.
Edited 2011-06-26 03:31 UTC