I HATE MICROSOFT WORD...any help !?!?

[Rick F]

Link to possible help:

Default line spacing and default paragraph spacing in Word 2007 differ from the default spacing in earlier versions of Word

[Donn]

By the way, with Open Office word processor, when you select save as, do you have the option of saving the file as an RTF file? RTF files are compatible with Microsoft Word and MS Word can open them.

That is one of the available save formats.

Along with .doc files that are compatable with MS Word.

But wouldn't it be a better world, if folks stopped using .doc files as if they were fit to send around in ordinary email correspondence, and learned to export their scribblings to RTF for that purpose? Then you certainly do not need to worry about which version of what text editing application - nearly anything can manage RTF - and on top of that it's bound to be much more compact.

I guess it's nice that a lot of that money for the fancy office suite software comes to our part of the country, but honestly that whole thing is more of a blight on the landscape than it's worth.

[cjk]

But wouldn't it be a better world, if folks stopped using .doc files as if they were fit to send around in ordinary email correspondence, and learned to export their scribblings to RTF for that purpose? Then you certainly do not need to worry about which version of what text editing application - nearly anything can manage RTF - and on top of that it's bound to be much more compact.

I totally agree with Mr Donn. Rich text format is good enough for 99.9% percent of documents that people need to produce.

While there are probably better ones out there, the little wordpad application that ships with windows is probably good enough.

Something I use a lot is a freeware pdf "printer". I use this one on windows: http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php" target="_blank

I use it to "print" stuff to pdf files quite frequently. This capability is often useful.

[elimia]

Chinese tubas...American computers...

SOMEONE has their priorities all screwed up.

Joe-
Hate to tell you, but Apple Macs, iPads, iPhones, etc. are produced in China {designed by Apple in California, assembled in China}--just like all other computers....but the Apple products work better--that is the bottom line...
mark

And therein is my question regarding the cost of Macs - why are they still so d----ed expensive if they are now made in China? They would seriously open up their own market by pricing their products more reasonably. Are they not pricing them on the notion of 'Made in America'? Please clarify.

Written on a used Mac laptop because this user can't afford the cost of a new one...

[Donn]

I think they're pricing them on the notion of "consumers will pay that much."

You might be able to run MacOS on hardware that doesn't come from Apple, if you think that might be more economical. Cf. "hackintosh".

[ghmerrill]

By the way, with Open Office word processor, when you select save as, do you have the option of saving the file as an RTF file? RTF files are compatible with Microsoft Word and MS Word can open them.

My $.01 worth.

That is one of the available save formats.

Along with .doc files that are compatable with MS Word.

Again, let me emphasize that the degree of compatibility here is not very high. If you are doing the very simplest things, and definitely avoiding things like nested lists, tables with lists in them, nested tables, and any even reasonably sophisticated formatting (multiple colums? highly tuned vertical or horizontal spacing?), then the .doc files produced by Open Office are "compatible" with MS Word. Even then you will discover rather constant oddities in spacing and your MS Word file will look different from your Open Office file. And this doesn't touch the issue of fonts. The consequence is that if you use Open Office to create .doc files, you can't have any degree of confidence in how that file will display to someone who has some (perhaps unknown) version of Word that you send it to. Unfortunately, this makes Open Office virtually useless in almost any business environment.

I really tried to make this work over a couple of years and was severely disappointed that Open Office had not been improved to the necessary degree in the years since I had previously tested it. My last attempt was last year where I tried to make use of it for a variety of documents I was creating in teaching a university philosophy course. The problem was that once I was done with the Open Office document (and this included both the "Word compatible" and the "Powerpoint compatible" documents) I would take them into the classroom, put them up on the Windows system there, and the display in Word or Powerpoint would always be different to some degree, and often would be bizarrely different. And there are things that Open Office just can't do in terms of displaying stuff correctly in Word. (There are also a lot of Word documents that, when you attempt to import them into Open Office, cause Open Office to throw up on its shoes.) I took to carefully previewing my Open Office documents in the Microsoft tools, and found that I really needed to constantly "correct" them in Word or Powerpoint. But then why use Open Office at all? You just know it isn't going to display correctly. So I gave up.

It is VERY difficult to develop an application like Open Office and continue to maintain compatibility with something like Word or Powerpoint. You are always shooting at a moving target, and I swear that MS loves to make little tweaks just to screw up third party vendors. (For about fifteen years I was a professional compiler writer for a product that was head-to-head with MS in that marketplace, and I know all about trying to keep up with their releases in terms of compatibility.) Open Office was a grand and noble idea (as many "open source" ideas are). But after an initial attempt at implementation and the necessary functionality, it languished. Needed improvements were never made, and it has never been truly competitive with the commercial products. There was some hope that Sun would overcome this trend, but that never happened either. Disappointing, but understandable.

Possible use of Open Office for you really depends on your specific needs. You can have a high degree of success if you use it by itself, share files in Open Office formats with others using Open Office, and use it to create printed output. (Even there you will encounter some unexpected frustrations, but you can probably live with these. MS Word has its own set of frustrations. Since Open Office is an attempted clone of it, you can expect the same frustrations at some point. Which raises the question: "If you wanted to create a decent word processor, why in the world would you ever use Word as your model? Because it's what people are "used to"? But I digress.) If you choose to use Open Office, you need to be really careful in using it to generate .doc and .ppt files and in expecting these to display as your Open Office files do.

[bisontuba]

Hi-
Yes, you get what you pay for--Mac's have a higher quality of components, are easier to use, and last a LOT longer than PC's....yes, they do cost more, but they are well worth it in the long run, IMHO...

mark

[ghmerrill]

Chinese tubas...American computers...

SOMEONE has their priorities all screwed up.

And therein is my question regarding the cost of Macs - why are they still so d----ed expensive if they are now made in China? They would seriously open up their own market by pricing their products more reasonably. Are they not pricing them on the notion of 'Made in America'? Please clarify.

This has always been an interesting question about Apple products in general. Part of the reason, I think, is that Apple has never had anywhere near the share of the PC market that has been held by Intel-based processor PCs (and their clones) for decades now. Part of the reason for this is that at a fairly early point (and at other points along the way) Apple chose to target certain "niche" markets that it felt were more "compatible with" its designs, goals, and production capabilities. They have always held their sights firmly on the education market and, partly as a consequence, basically abandoned the business market to others. But this has not been a bad idea for them since the competition in the business PC market pretty quickly became a cutthroat, mass volume, low cost and profit margin kind of affair. In that market you differentiate yourself primarily (nowadays at least) on grounds of price, reliability, and service/support. Apple differentiates itself primarily on grounds of reliability, superior design, and superior useability. But if you're a VP in IT purchasing, which way do you think you're going to go?

So after that, I think it's elementary supply/demand/scale issues in economics.

Apple has always been very strong in the educational and some other markets (graphic design, for example). They're all over the universities (especially among the faculty), and despite their significantly higher cost. A lot of students buy them, partly because the faculty do, partly because Macs are much "cooler" than MS PCs, etc. And Apple has always had a very powerful cult following. So they're doing well with this approach.

You also have to remember that the total cost of a product like a personal computer includes much more than the hardware. It includes the operating system and the applications as well -- and its the OS and the better-designed and implemented apps that Apple is really selling. These are what you're paying the premium for. These are not being cranked out in China, and reduced costs for materials and assembly do not affect them. Same with the iPhone, etc.

It is a good question concerning how much Apple would open its market by lowering the cost of their systems. While more individuals MIGHT buy them, this would in no way affect where the really big bucks are: in the business market. MS, and the whole suite of MS tools, is so firmly entrenched there now that I don't think Apple would make even a small dent through price changes. And my completely unsupported guess would be that even if they lowered the price to increase individual and education sales, the result would be at best a wash in terms of revenues. But that's just speculation.

[ghmerrill]

I really don't understand why the Mac users thought they had an "issue" to champion via the topic of this thread...Just like everyone else, they're stuck with having to send out (MICROSOFT) WORD-readable documents just like everyone else.

Gee, I didn't think I saw much championing at all in this thread -- compared to what I'm accustomed to from the fanatic (though usually young) Mac cultists I know. But I guess that impression depends on the crowd you run with .

However, I really don't understand the argument that everyone needs to send out Word-readable documents. The ONLY reason(s) to have to exchange Word-readable documents are if (a) your business requires it (i.e., the company you work for requires that you produce documentation in Word format), or (b) you want the readers of the documents to be able to CHANGE the documents. Otherwise, PDF is now pretty much the document format standard -- and you'll note that the latest releases of Word finally support PDF output reasonably and straightforwardly (well, mostly; I've seen some glitches), so even MS has gotten the message on that. In general, creating PDF documents is a much better way to go since then no one can easily change them (or if they do, this in general is pretty obvious and also requires a certain amount of determination and skill). PDF readers are free, everyone has one (you have to in order to get very far on the web nowadays), and you can even get applications for "marking up" PDFs if you want to add corrections or comments and return those to the author. Even in the large companies that I worked for, and which adopted Word as the "standard" word processor and document creation tool, I ended up putting most of my documents out in PDF format, and there were no problems with this.

Now it is true that if you actually get into publishing it is the case that some journals or conferences require submissions in Word format. However, these are generally humanities journals/conferences since the scientists know full well that Word is not adequate for their needs. Most journals support submissions in either Word (or Word/PDF) format or LaTeX (or LaTeX/PDF) format. And those that don't (in my experience) will loosen the Word requirement if you ask them too -- since there's really no justification for it. Printers would prefer to avoid Word!!

A remaining hold-out to some degree is Kindle. I think that if you want to publish a Kindle book, you are probably best served by doing it in word and using Amazon's converter. But even there, if you know enough to manage your own HTML output and editing, I don't think it's necessary.

[The Jackson]

I've not taken the time to ask my friends who go to other schools, but the SafeAssignment upload system that UMiami uses accepts PDF, RTF, and even TXT files. We students get MS Office for free, but I have not seen any evidence of it being imposed as a de facto standard or something like that. All of the teachers I've had preferred most written assignments be turned in by hand, anyway. The online uploads seemed to be reserved for the last papers of each term.

[TubaTodd]

Putting my official "nerd stamp" on this topic...

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice became a second class citizen. Well, since the code was open source, the "community at large" said "we'll take that...thank you." Now we have...

http://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice IS OpenOffice, with a new name. Recently Oracle gave the OpenOffice "stuff" they still had over to the Apache Foundation. I'm not sure what that means, but going forward you're going to want to download and use LibreOffice. It's the latest code base. Version 3.4 is the most current.

[k001k47]

Remember when Microsoft was good?

[Kevin Hendrick]

Remember when Microsoft was good?

Still is, if you cook it right ...