Do OpenOffice Users Save In Microsoft Format? 620
superglaze writes "Looking through an article on the smartphone office suite Quickoffice, I noted a claim by a company executive that OpenOffice users usually save their documents in a Microsoft format, e.g. .doc. Hence the company has no plans to support .odf. I guess I can see the rationale for this — it helps if you're sending a document to an MS-using company — but what's this community's general experience of saving in .odf vs. .doc format?"
Save in ODF (Score:3, Interesting)
ODF for me, DOC for thee (Score:4, Interesting)
my experiences (Score:2, Interesting)
Count Two (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm in the position of being able to return a
Re:ODF for me, DOC for thee (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, what I'd like (and might be available, I haven't looked) is the option to automatically save in multiple formats whenever you push the save key. If it automatically "worked" in
Interopability (Score:2, Interesting)
'.doc' is not a single format (Score:3, Interesting)
'.doc' is a whole shitload of different formats, some very differentm some only a little different. However, it is because of the differences that sales for new versions of MS Office are driven. If the old programs could read the new formats, then we wouldn't have that problem. Why else do you think that MS Offfice 2007 munges your old files [slideshare.net]?
If MS published the specs for the old binary formats, we wouldn't ahve that problem either. Or if MS Office supported an open format like OpenDocument we wouldn't have that problem.
The way off the treadmill is openformats [sun.com] even for MS Office.
Users are lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:my experiences (Score:3, Interesting)
Lesson #1: Microsoft's Office suite has as many gotchas as OO.org.
Lesson #2: Don't ever trust your potential customer when they tell you, "Don't worry we've got all that.."
Going to ODT (Score:3, Interesting)
When I save to ODT, the documents are stable.
When I save to
However, I do use OOo to fix corrupted word documents. I open them, save them as ODT, then resave them as word and then word does not crash on them any more.
We need a really easy-to-use tool... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that people's computers aren't coming pre-installed with software that can read our "primary" Open File Formats. Heck -- even when I send my Macintosh-toting friends Ogg Vorbis files, they don't have any idea how to open them, so eventually I get enough complaints and just re-encode in mp3 format (and feel bad about trying and failing at spreading the Good Word).
Perhaps the best thing that us geeks could do to support open file formats is to develop a little "Unknown File Format" system utility for all of the current flavors of Windows and OSX. The utility would sit in the background and would pop up a little note whenever the user tried to open a file of an unrecognized type, telling the user that the file was, say, an XCF image file created by The GIMP, and offering to download an appropriate program to either view or edit the file.
If we had such a tool, we could feel much better about sending out open file formats like Ogg Vorbis, knowing that even clueless users would only be a click away from opening our files.
Re:Only the clueless ones do (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't give in! (Score:3, Interesting)
The obvious example is resumes that you send via a recruitment agency. They edit it to remove all your contact details and any URLs that link to your work before faxing it to the customer.
Hence why they refuse to accept PDFs even though that's the most logical format (guaranteed correct layout, compatibility, ease of viewing/printing)
Re:I save in ODF (Score:2, Interesting)
>I'm a dick that likes to slow down the business process and make others install redundant software (if they are even allowed to) that both costs time and money, but I don't care because it makes me feel important.
Actually I am a dick that refuses to buy or install redundant software (if I could afford to) just to make some mega corporation (MS) money.
Re:Don't give in! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Count at least ONE who doesnt. (Score:3, Interesting)
Since then I have acquired a
Re:Count Two (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no engineer, but I send my files only as PDFs.
I'm well aware not many people use OO.o, so I take care to provide them with a universally readable document.
The fact that they can't edit it is an added bonus, too.
Though a funny thing happened a while ago... one of my college professors mailed me with a question on how to "open files created with a Linux office suite" (it's a faculty of humanities, and I'm one of the few Linux freaks there).
I offered her to convert the documents for her if there are not too many of them, and directed her to OO.o in any case, as both the likely originator of those files and a free office suite. I think she liked it.
Anyway, she or one of her gay activist friends mailed me and some other people once, asking us whether we could volunteer at organizing a queer festival, and then sent a .doc attachment. So I seized the moment to inform them about open formats, and that they are not the only minority 'round here. And would they please send such attachments as .rtf or .html in the future.
Activists are great if you want to get the message through; you just have to put it in the terms they will readily accept.
Re:Count Two (Score:2, Interesting)
I've thought for quite a while now, that 90% of the time, when people spread stuff in MS Office formats, they should've used some other format instead. I worked for a company a while back, where the CEO would send his e-mails with only his name as the actual message, and all other content as Word documents. If he had three different things he wanted to tell us about, he'd send three different Word
Now I just need to get our teachers to send their presentation slides as pdf-files, or something other than word documents
Re:Count at least ONE who doesnt. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, they ended up delaying my moving significantly and then asking me for some extra fees that I'd never known about. I objected, and they said this information was all in the doc file I'd signed.
"Oh, the one I could barely read? It wasn't shown in the version I saw, because I couldn't read much. I sent you what WordPad did with it - what I signed was that."
Turned out that a lot of the major clauses were missing in that version due to WordPad's crummy handling - but since I'd signed it, and they'd accepted it (I presume without looking at it, otherwise they would have seen how mangled it was), they had technically agreed to the modified version which didn't have any of those fees at all.
I was tired of dealing with them by then anyway, so I told them to either deliver my stuff at the price that I'd agreed to or send it back to the place they'd picked it up from and refund my money, as I'd certainly never agreed to give them more than they had already received. They delivered it in two days.
Re:Count at least TWO who don't. (Score:3, Interesting)
She called me crazy, I took it up with the billing department and demanded a refund of my tuition and filed a complaint. A week later I was turning in written papers to a different professor.
Re:Count Two (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Count at least TWO who don't. (Score:3, Interesting)
The student was fully correct to 1) try to negotiate with the teach and 2) when that failed, switch to a more competent one. If the teacher is *requiring* a format that can be used by only one application on only one platform (both of which are expensive to acquire, operate and maintain) then they have too much ignorance or too much of an axe to grind to be allowed to continue teaching. To add to the damage, that application munges older files in older formats [slideshare.net]
They hate me for my freedom. (Heh.) (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, Office is also a must. Office:Mac v.X and Office:Mac v.2004 are acceptable to the IT department and to professors. OpenOffice, on the other hand, is not.
So basically my dilemma was between purity or finishing my baccalaureate. I chose finishing my baccalaureate. Most University IT departments are like this, by the way. They are very F/OSS unfriendly and very Windows-centric. Microsoft has bought a lot of headspace in American academia.
Re:Count at least TWO who don't. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya, I can see how $7 is a lot to a college student, and $100 is a lot to anyone with a full time job. Oh wait its not.
I concede that I pulled $3xx from the Super-Duper Mega Ultra Office Edition, but it just happened to be the first thing a search turned up. OTOH, I wasn't including the cost of Windows in that, which, if we're talking about the cost of "using Word," should be in there.
The cost of Windows is typically included in the cost of the computer. If buying the computer already covers Windows, so you don't need to include it again. Of course colleges ALSO offer discounted versions of Windows as well, so again, not a huge expense for college students, and it could even be included in student loans.
I don't know what you're talking about here, but I've never seen the "works properly" version of Office. I can't get the damn thing to get out of my way and let me work. It's all in what you're used to, I guess
You know, lets you get things formatted the way you want. The one that doesn't crash on a constant basis. OOo doesn't include an email progam, so I'll pick on Kmail, that steaming pile that would for no reason corrupt mailbox indexes making it seem as though all your mail disappeared. But i guess its no problem to just delete the index from time to time, because that should be part of normal use anyway.
Oh, like Office '97? Nope. '95? Uh, no. It's not even compatible with earlier versions of their own product! OOo, on the other hand, is compatible with damn near whatever format you can think to throw at it.
Funny how nobody I've met has had these problems, and I haven't either. OOo opens pretty much its own format, and certainly doesn't open Word files in anywhere close to properly.
Oh, that's right. Because so many people get Office support from Microsoft. When was the last time you called them?
Well I haven't had to call them about Office, because I haven't had any issues with it. I did call them for support with MS Money though, twice, and they did resolve both issues. Compared to the idiot FOSS people who either don't read your message and respond with RTFM!! (which, by the way, where IS the manual.. oh it doesn't exist half the time) or remain silent, because I guess nobody can explain what's going wrong.
And just because you got suckered into paying through the nose for a half-assed version of what should by 2007 be commodity software, don't take your bitterness out on the rest of us.
Bitter? Sure. Not because I feel cheated, I wouldn't pay for something I didn't find value in. The bitter part comes from the FOSS failing me. I ran my own Linux server for 10 years, Linux on the desktop for three. It was ok in college, when I wanted to tinker anyway, but when I just want it to work, and to be able to make changes quickly and easily, it failed. RPM hell, poor documentation and only text file configurations, people saying I'm an idiot for not buying some five year old dot matrix printer, because why should I expect anything to work on Linux I guess, wierd problems and crashes to which there were NO answers.. ya, after trying Linux for quite a while, I gladly went back to MS.