yeah, I agree with all of that.. one other reason I am sticking with csv now is apparently it imports well into the most common australian accounts packages.. MYOB..
since most of them use it.. that seems to be a good reason.... rgds Franki -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Jack Coates Sent: Friday, 4 April 2003 12:21 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [expert] open source spreadsheet file format. On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 02:36, Frankie wrote: > by that same analogy, rtf should not exist either and data can be handed out > as txt files with no formating... > users could add the own formatting.. > > I am simply trying to see things though the eyes of our users, who vary form > developers to complete computer newbies.. ... see, that's your mistake -- empathizing with the users only leads to heartache. Tell 'em what they're getting and if they don't like it they can have an IBM Selectric and a ream of carbon paper :-) Seriously, you're right that the users will care about formatting -- I'm currently saddled with a hellish pricing tool that generates poorly formatted Excel sheets that I have to fix before sending out, and I do care. This gives you two options: 1) generate editable content. At this point in time there is only one standard that they will accept, and that is MS Excel. The end. I do the above editing in OpenOffice or Gnumeric, but I always work with the Excel file format. Ditto for Word, Power Point, etc. 2) generate non-editable content. This can be HTML or PDF. But if your users are going to reformat or edit, don't saddle them with this. Let them use spreadsheets to edit spreadsheets and word processors to edit documents, don't force them to fire up Mozilla Composer or Front Page to fix a typo. -- Jack Coates Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture... Are you compliant yet? ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3514.txt
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