[PLUG] Put an End to Word Attachments

Alex Daniloff alex at daniloff.com
Wed Apr 10 18:11:22 UTC 2002


Hello Linux folkz,
The main ussue is not in Linux whether it can play nice with others or
not.
The issue is in .DOC .XLS .PPT .MDB .LDB and other M$ formats.
Almost every new issue of M$ Office doesn't play well with its own
files created with older versions of itself and other way around.
Especially, if these files were created with a lot macros and links.
This problem became a nightmare for our facility and department.
Almost all engineering data and analysis created ten and more years
back and saved in earlier versions of Excell, Power Point, Access and
some Word documents became inaccessible for M$ Office XP and 97.
Literally speaking our management started to pull hair on their asses.
Hey, they even proposed to set up a few good old DOS boxes to read
files created with Word/Excel 3.11. Brilliant idea! Which is
failed,because DOS can't cope anymore with modern BIOSes and P4
hardware.
In my opinion all these M$ Office formats should be abandoned not only
because they are created by our main foe M$ but because they are not
mantaining persistancy of itself from version to version.
We need document and data formats which have live span close to
infinity.
Alex



 
 
> Sure, it's rude for people to assume that .DOC is the lingua franca
of e-mail
> attachments... but is having an editor that can read this format
really
> any different or more inconvenient than supporting SMB networking or
having
> the ability to mount FAT32/NTFS volumes?
> 
> Linux may well take over the world, but it won't do so by refusing
to play
> nice with others.
> 
> Dylan
 




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