Roger Oberholtzer said the following on 05/16/2011 02:43 AM:
Having said that, I can agree about locations of things like images. I get Word docs all the time that contain images. They never render properly (screen or print). I am not talking little things. I just got a Word .docx file with scientific plots (jpegs) and when veiwed in OO or LO all the images were in Lilliput postage stamp sized boxes at the top of the first page. They should have been on various pages in locations with captions. These sort of things happen all the time.
Yes, I see this a LOT with my clients.
They go through this every time they upgrade MS-Office.
Part of the reason is simply that different versions of MS-Word render
things differently, but its complicated by user behaviour.
Users seem to want the dancing-pigs over portability or clarity (or
security) every time.
There are some users who don't use style sheets and format everything
the "hard way", not just using tabs and space but over-riding line
spacing, character spacing and so on pretty much on a line-by-line basis.
And yes, I've been guilty of this to get pages to fit 'just right' on
resumes and trifold brochures. What we are really doing is using the
word processor as a typesetter or layout engine. We should be using
Inkscape or Pagemaker or Tex or more likely, Scribus. Scribus is GOOD!
Once you start buqqering around with styles and fonts that aren't the
same between releases (fonts get updated too!) thing look wild.
And graphics! Just as with web pages, there are so many ways to do
graphics in a word document ...
I have documents that were written in Office-97 that don't render
properly in Office-2000 or later; that still MICROSOFT. And that's
PowerPoint as well as Word. People have sent me graphics in PowerPoint
rather than the jpg or gif -- I can't understand why, it just bloats --
and the result isn't portable to any of the Windows machines I have
access to; again an issue of revisions.
This is one reason I send out documents as either plain text or as
PDF-1.3. And I keep them SIMPLE.
--
Anton J Aylward, CISSP, CISA