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Thinking about switching

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worker201:
I have to think about what works best for me.

The other day, I needed to print a Word document.  And when I say Word document, I mean the nastiest thing ever - floating table elements, background printing, the works.  At that time I had 3 programs on the Mac to try with.  Mariner Write, my no-nonsense word processor, wouldn't even open it.  Abi-Word and Pages opened it, but weren't able to correctly display many of the elements.  What I ended up doing was opening it with OpenOffice on the Windows computer and printing to PDF, and then printing the PDF from the Mac (network printer issues aren't solved yet).

The Win OpenOffice interpretation of the document wasn't perfect, but it was acceptable for my purposes.  The main reason I didn't use Mac OpenOffice is because the Leopard implementation of X11 broke OpenOffice.  However, while I wasn't looking, a native OSX app was released in October.  I downloaded it yesterday, and checked the evil document to see how it looked.  Unbelievably, it was not quite right.  I had the same document open in the same program, one on a Mac and one in Windows, and they were different.  This is a major issue.  I need to be able to view documents very precisely.  If people are going to be producing stuff like that with Word (the shouldn't, but that's another story), I might need to have Word available in some form.

There's also the Excel issue.  The program I use for school (and work after that) can process Excel files directly, with no issues.  But only if they are Excel files.  .xls files created in OpenOffice or some other spreadsheet don't work.  The only way to get an OpenOffice file to work is to create a headered ascii table, which is a couple extra steps outside the spreadsheet program.  I think this has to do with the program reading special proprietary embedded headers from the document, rather than interpreting the table itself and figuring out what to do - which is bad programming, but since the program only runs on Windows, they figured it was safe.

Thus, it looks like I might have to invest in Microsoft Office.  It's a damn travesty, but I don't see any other options.  I have to be able to view documents precisely.  And I need to have a spreadsheet that can be used to edit and create table files for ArcGIS.  OpenOffice has tried really hard to work as an Office replacement, and in many ways it outperforms Office.  But OpenOffice can't cover all aspects, and occasionally people get to the point where they have to choose between industry standards and personal politics.

Comments welcome.

davidnix71:
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/Dev_DEV300_m33/

has the downloads for the Aqua versions of OpenOffice. I don't see posts anywhere about how OO is broken in Leopard. I still use Tiger and have no problems. OO starts and runs much better than it used to. I also have done the Apple supplied X11 update.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/x11update2006113.html
This allows use of native fonts.

NeoOffice is free and native. http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

Lead Head:
Were you running both OpenOffice 3.0.0 on both the Mac and the PC? The OSX PPC version seems to be version 2.4.0, while the x86 one is 3.0.0.

I have a copy of Office 2007 ultimate, that I got free (legally too) from Microsoft. It looks VERY out of place on XP, and is just completely different then any other app on XP, which makes it a bit annoying to use. But it integrates much much better on Vista and Windows 7 Beta

worker201:
Ok, it turns out the Windows version I have is 2.4.  I'm downloading the 3.0 version now, so that I can verify the comparison.  However, if it displays the document the same way the Mac does, that will indicate that OpenOffice actually has lost some Word compatibility over the version change.

David, the last version of OpenOffice (2.4?) was not Leopard compatible.  It required X11, and the version of X11 shipped with Leopard was only half-working.  The XQuartz people have been working pretty hard on it, enough so that gimp now works great in Leopard, but OpenOffice support was hit or miss.  It worked in some versions of XQuartz, but not in others.  Now that OpenOffice has released a standalone binary, there is no issue.
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki

worker201:
Mmmkay, just finished installing OO 3.0 on the Windows machine.  The functionality is identical to the Mac now.  However, I'm not sure whether it is a flaw or not.  On closer inspection, it might be a non-printing character that I'm not familiar with.  It's a small red triangle in the lower left corner of a text box, but it cannot be selected or manipulated in any way.  If I export the document to PDF, or print, it does not appear in the output.  Weird.

But anyway, it does appear that OO might work out as a Word document reader.  Unfortunately, there are tons more crazy things that people can and do put into Word docs that I may have to deal with in the future, I might need to be sure.  And there's also the Excel compatibility issue to consider.

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