Hi Sebastian,
Sebastian Smith wrote:
IMHO, at best Microsoft would add support for open formats in the
Office suite before a significant decline in sales occurs. Of course,
they'll limit editing capabilities for those files so that users will
rely more heavily on their proprietary formats... but it would be a
start.
I'm trying to institute a policy similar to Massachusetts at my office
because I'm having several document compatibility issues. For
example, in our conference room we have an iMac running OS 9.x that is
capable of playing Powerpoint presentations stored in early formats.
The "creative" department is also beginning to use Keynote, a
presentation software by Apple that is designed to run on OS X
10.2.8+. The problems? A) Powerpoint cannot be used to its full
capability because the new file formats cannot be played (if they are
fonts/etc get all messed up), B) Keynote won't run on the conference
room computer. Furthermore, when preparing a presentation to be given
offsite, I find it naive to assume that the presentation you are
creating in PPT, keynote, or OOo will display properly, or even be
openable at another location. For that matter, it is also naive to
assume that any document file will be displayed exactly as you see it
at another location -- what if you used an odd font, or are using
different versions of software. For these reasons I'm trying to push
management into a PDF only policy. Users can continue to use the
Office suite (or whatever they prefer) to edit their documents, but
the end result must be in PDF format. The software to support this
structure will cost more, but the end result will be less headaches.
Why would it cost more? Have you tried out PDF Creator
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator)?
John
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