3. Re: Installing MS Word with Wine (sdavmor)

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 19 October 2006 16:22, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Eberhard Roloff wrote:
> > Trevor Wiseman wrote:
> >> I have to ask WHY? OpenOffice Word Processing will do everything that
> >> Word
> >> can do and can read/write .doc files for free?  Maybe I'm missing
> >> something.  Good luck.
> >
> > Yes it can do most of what MS word can do, but their still are
> > compatibility issues. Ex. I tried to work with OOOrg 2.01 within a group
> > of 6 writers, the other five were on word '03. We were tasked with making
> > up a documentation of a very large IT project that took about 500 pages,
> > done with very sophisticated word usage. I found it impossible to cleanly
> > interfere with this group using my OOorg and had to switch back to
>
> Frankly, it shouldn't be too difficult to "interfere" with them :-)  It's
> hardly fair to blame it on OO.  ime, it's impossible to use Word for
> collaborative projects, because it won't even let two Word users edit a
> file without overriding someone's preferred formatting along the way (e.g.,
> today, my office-mate was writing minutes for a meeting, using the previous
> meeting's minutes as a template.  The "attendee" list had been formatted in
> two columns - whenever he tried to change any name in the list, it reverted
> to a single column).
>
I use OO writer almost exclusively when I am developing a document, but unless 
the document has only very simple formatting I pull it up in Word before 
e-mailing it to the customer.  I also sometimes get documents that won't open 
in OO writer.

Word is certainly not perfect, but it is a defacto standard many of us have to 
deal with.  I have started, with some of my more clueful customers, to send 
dcouments in both .doc and .odt format.

If the deliverable is on paper or if you have a customer that is open source 
friendly, then I think OO writer is suitable for most subjects.  As an 
example, this book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildpc2/

was written with either OO writer or Star Office (I don't recall for sure).

Scott K