[cw-discuss] Miserable 6.0 experience...

[James E. LaBarre]

Bodvar Bjorgvinsson wrote:
> What I cannot for the life of me understand is why Linux users are
> bothering trying to use M$ Word on their Linux installations. Why not
> Open Office? The only thing I have found out to be "better" in the M$
> Office are Excel and PowerPoint.
> 
> M$ Word IS GENUINE JUNK and has been proven so by all too many. Basta.
> My experience of M$ Word in publishing has at times been disastrous.
> 
> If you are doing something really serous, you have Adobe FrameMaker
> and the old-fashioned TeX/LaTex.
> 
> With OOo you can save your work in M$ Word format and not loose a
> thing, unless you are doing some very complex job.


Well, you answer your question right there, "...unless you are doing 
some very complex job".  Unfortunately, "complex" doesn't necessarily 
mean the document *content* is complex, but that the formatting is.  And 
if that's the sort of documents you have to deal with on a daily basis, 
and have to do 2-way exchanges with MSWord users, then unfortunately 
MSWord is the only way to go.

I can say I encountered one of those documents just last week.  I had a 
job application I needed to fill out, and the people in CTG's HR 
department made the document extremely complex, with check-boxes laid 
out in a complex order, and pop-up dialogues for filling out each text 
field (but no hint, I must say, of what each field was when it popped 
up).  In OpenOffice (2.0.4), the checkboxes were scattered all across 
the document, nowhere near where they should be.  Of course, since the 
newest version of MSWord I have is MSOffice95, OOo was my only option 
anyway (tried it in AbiWord and KWord, it was *worse* there)

That being said, you are right that the MAJORITY of documents for MSWord 
could readily be done in OOo, KWord, etc.  Just as how I find OOo Calc & 
Gnumeric do everything I have ever needed to do with MSExcel 
spreadsheets.  As for that application document I had so much trouble 
with, I should see if I could get permission to send it to the OOo 
developers as a test document for future versions.