On Fri, 2002-03-29 at 16:54, John Blue wrote:
I am using SuSE 7.3 and still learning basics at the beginning of a move of a small home/office network from M$ NT4 / 2K to Linux (or at least as far as I can go).
I have used Star Office 5.1, 5.2, and 6 beta as well as Open Office on Windows NT, but have not as yet stated using applications in a Linux environment. That will come but I am still learning and playing around.
One significant problem we have is that my wife receives a lot of word processing documents and occasional spreadsheet files, and the odd presentation file from members of an organisation in which she has an executive role. These files invariably originate from an M$ Office version from 95 to XP.
In most cases she has success with reading them in SO5.2 and then edits, or creates documents and saves them in M$ Office 97 format to send out.
Her recipients often have difficulty in reading these files.
Has anyone suggestions on the best way of dealing with this problem? Which software would do the best job, presently under M$ NT4, but subsequently under Linux? My preference is not to have to run M$Office...!
All advice appreciated.
snipped
It is too late to suggest that you try the StarOffice 6 beta, as StarOffice 6 will be generally unavailable for the next couple of months.
However OpenOffice is available and works as well as StarOffice. With the latest OO 641D some of the differences that were visible between SO 6 and OO 6xx appear to have disappeared.
You can set OO or SO to automatically save your files as MS Office formats. You do not have to specifically import or convert MS files into OO/SO, you just open the MS files directly into OO/SO, seamlessly.
My day job plus my startup company make extensive use of MS files. My employer and customers send files in MS format and expect to receive everything back in MS format. The new OO/SO does an excellent job of handling these MS files such that no one even questions how the files have been handled. With Word and Excel files the transfer success is probably 95 to 98%. The 2 to 5% failure in exchanging files is not a small piece of several files but rather one or two problems files that do not import or export well. This failure rate is low enough that MS users expect it, as transferring files from Word95 to Word97 to Word2000 to WordXP will produce similar if not higher failure rates. I have had 2 page simple Word documents that would not transfer well and have also had 45 page word documents with automated Table of Contents, embedded pictures, multiple sections with differing headers and footers plus text with coloured backgrounds that were imported perfectly.
My experience is that MS powerpoint files (4 to 19 MB) are successfully transferred OO/SO about 85 to 90% of the time. The real business ppt and pps seem to be transferred fine and it is mostly the joke ones that do not open up correctly in OO/SO. Perhaps it is the extra animations in the joke pps that cause the problem.
I encourage you to try OO 641D (www.openoffice.org). The linux binary download is around 65 MB (openoffice does not include a database or java) and the installation is very simple. Spend about 1/2 hour setting up the options and defaults and MS Office is not needed. With OO/SO you do not need to try and convince the world around you to abandon their MS Office and to send all files to you in RTF or non-proprietary formats, which is not going to happen.
Hi Ralph, Your detailed response is very much appreciated. I have downloaded the windows version of 641d and we will try it out, using some of the files that had caused problems recently. Once I have the linux system running OK I will download the Linux versions and see how we go.
Best wishes, John
-- Ralph Sanford - If your government does not trust you, rsanford@telusplanet.net - should you trust your government?
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John Blue, PO Box 542 Mawson ACT 2607 Australia email: jblue@bestpond.com Fax: +61 2 6291 1119 Thought for the day: Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people that they are right, whether they are or not.