screwmez app

I have Office 365 home which gives me 5 licences for less than £80/year (I paid less than the headline price). I use two and share the others with family.

It can also go on 5 tablets and 5 phones as well, so that actually works out at about £5 per copy if I used them all.

Neil

This is a really good subject for one of those "I've come for an argument" discussions!

I would argue that Office is a classic example of the "Proprietary Trap".

There's no technical reason why a word processor should generate files containing features that are incompatible with another word processor. There's a profit motive for compromising inter-operabiliy and some vendors repeatedly fall foul of anti-trust legislation and the like. It's revealing that they can afford to keep paying fines running to billions of dollars.

An enterprise will have big problems escaping from a proprietary trap. Once addicted it's painful and expensive to give up such software once it's deeply embedded across the organisation and it's partners.

Not using incompatible features is a good strategy. Word processors have been adding features ever since Mr Wang hit the market in the 70's. Nowadays very few people are capable of using all the capabilities of their word processor. I wonder what it is that new versions of Office provide that's so essential?

In the spirit of starting a row, I declare that proprietary software will end civilisation as we know it; it's only used by people who've been brainwashed; people who like it won't be invited to the rapture; they'll be drummed out of the regiment; and we should all be using quills anyway.

If anyone wants to punch me there's no need. I'm only online causing trouble because I have a messy nose-bleed. Ho hum.

Cheers,

Dave

.

I'm happy to be on your side in that particular brawl, Dave

MichaelG.

Oh I don't disagree that I'm 'trapped' by the need to read client's files with 100% reliability. But it's not expensive for an 'insurance policy'.

I also LIKE the way it works, compared to the free ones, which look and feel like Office circa 2005 - I actually like all the new bits as they make me more productive iMHO even if they are mostly just colourful ways of accessing old functionality they are much easier to use.

N.

Who uses LibreOffice?

Have you tried V5.2, Neil?

I used V4.x and did find it wanting in some areas, such as imports from Office, but newer versions seem to be OK with the Office files I have tried, which were Word & Power point, from the school my Mrs works at.

Martin.

Mike and Neil - you are both far too gentlemanly!

I do my best to attract fulminating content and millions of hits, and all I get is violent agreement.

And Neil using the LIKE word on me is a deadly way of defusing a good row. How could I possibly take issue with someone who likes something?

Back to the drawing board...

Dave

I actually care what my documents look like so I've never used carp like MS Times New Roman for example. I like quite a few of the Adobe fonts that come with their packages. Chances are therefore that even if I did use MS Word many folks wouldn't see the document as intended anyway. This is where Word Processors, including MS Word fall down. I was heavily involved in the publishing of company documents years ago and it's fair to say that professionals in the print industry, at least the 4 or 5 I've dealt with, don't waste their time with WP programmes. It was all done with PDF files. In house we used PDF and InDesign. Of course you get idiots say things like you can't edit PDF files because they miss the point. They also miss the point that you can copy text and pictures from PDF files that aren't protected. I should add that one of our printers years ago would accept word files, but they charged us extra for the privilege as they used to load Word specially for us. All their other clients played the game and used PDF, and this was over 20 years ago.

.

If you want to get my back up ... just keep calling me Mike

... I always sign myself Michael, and that's what I prefer.

MichaelG.

I work in word but things like reports get saved as PDFs.

I do all my proofing in Acrobat, but I would hate to use it as a word processor - it's an advanced reader/viewer/proofing/collaboration tool. Create your document in Word THEN export it to PDF - the clue's in the names, one is a 'word processor' the other is a 'portable document format'.

Naturally our designers use PDFs and Indesign, I do all my proofing in acrobat but I do the editing in Word.

(It's amazing the fonts and layout contributors use; don't tell anyone but my first job editing any document for MEW is to strip out all the fancy formatting and fonts...)

Copying text from PDFs is a nightmare as it adds a new line at the end of EVERY line so if you want to convert easily to a word processor you have to pay Adobe.

neil

Well that's just typical. My deliberate attempt to start a ruckus fails and then I put my foot in it by accident.

Sorry!

Dave

.

Neil,

Actually, with a little bit of foresight, and with zero expense by using open source and free software, it really isn't that difficult for a developer to create an installation package that will install a utility that will run reliably on all versions of Windows - XP and newer.

Most development environments have tools that will generate a list of dependencies so by using a free installer package - I use and can recommend Inno Setup, it is easy to ensure that the necessary dependencies are installed at runtime. I distribute an open source cross platform (Windows & Linux) application that I first released in 2005 and despite a few hundred downloads a month, as far as I am aware no one has ever had any trouble getting the software to run.

So it probably isn't really necessary to turn down all utilities, as long the person making the offer understands that it needs to include a dependable installation package and isn't based on 20 year old technology that may or may not be supported in the latest incantation of Windows. If a developer is going to take the trouble to release something, then they should at least make the effort to ensure that it is usable.

Clive

Edited By clivel on 09/09/2016 21:45:50

Your reason for must having word was exchanging files with others. I'm not suggesting you don't use a WP just that it's more sensible to send PDF to others then you can be sure they see exactly what you do. I've never had a problem copying text or pictures from unprotected PDF files.

But these are hobbyists, not developers. They will have a set of tools to hand, have used them to make something that works for them.

My feeling is that as I have had multiple complaints and not one comment expressing appreciation for these two utilities, I have to assume that making such things available to readers is not a bonus, but actually something that has reduced their enjoyment of the magazine.

Clearly the benefits of such things to subscribers are minimal and the disbenefits are large, so I would be stupid to risk repeating the exercise.

Neil

PDFs are fine for finished reports, invoices etc. but hopeless where you are working on a document others need to edit properly. I shudder to think how I would cope with twenty people's feedback on a 100-page PDF when with Word I can use track changes and merge versions so that all their input can be incorporated without me having to retype it.

Also, when copying text from PDF a newline is inserted at the end of every line, completely destroying the paragraph formatting, very often the read order is jumbled as well. For this reason I won't cut and paste contributions sent as PDFs unless they are very short, you get far too many errors.

Photos in PDF are usually over-compressed and rarely at a usable resolution for anything other than the original document. The same applies to Word.

On the other hand, PDF is ideal for engineering drawings because you do get what the originator expects and as they are vectors it's easy for our designers to replace fonts (we use only house fonts bearing in mind we can only use ones we have licences for) and scale images to fit the page.

It sounds like you should be using OpenDocument Format files.

Martin.

Because it's nonproprietary and doesn't lock you in to one software supplier's product. Why Should I adhere to one corporations changeable standards, when I can use a product of my choice that uses an open global standard which I can share with anyone?

I think Microsoft give the option for ODF to be the default format to save documents in with their newer software releases too.

The links I posted explain in more detail why it's a good idea.

Martin.

Edited By blowlamp on 10/09/2016 16:24:26

I can honestly never understand why these things generate such high feelings? I only work p/t on MEW (not according to my Wife...) and the rest of the time I'm an environmental consultant. In three years of that and the previous 25 years since I worked with a typing pool, the only formats I've had to deal with other than word are Wordperfect and Wordstar (both many years ago).

For MEW I do get sent odt files and word opens & saves them them with no problems.

No-one has ever complained about getting microsoft documents (an M$ give away free viewers for their formats).

For me ease of use and compatibility trump everything else, why should I risk anything else just to save few quid and make a somewhat shaky point about globalisation?

Neil