[Sussex] IE no-more on the Mac

[Derek Harding]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 01:43:45PM +0100, Iain Stevenson wrote:
> 
> 
> --On Sunday, June 15, 2003 10:31:48 +0100 Jon Fautley <jon at geekpeople.net> 
> wrote:
> >
> >Agreed. 3a IT have been pushing OOo for a while now, and have noticed no
> >problems from clients. Convo usually goes sommat like:
> >"you can have office at 400 quid a pop or OOo for free"
> >"are there any compatibility issues?"
> >"we've not found any"
> >"i'll take OOo"
> >
> 
> Do you know whether Excel and PowerPoint are handled well in OpenOffice?
> 
> That Gentoo stuff looked interesting enough to get me to dust off a spare 
> drive and stick it on my G4.
> 
>  Iain
> 
I've used OOo and had no problems from MS format to OOo (except Excel macros which are commented out) but going back is different.

A spreadsheet without macros goes over to Excel fine, OOo used to modify data from an original Excel (with macros - say) goes over fine except the macros are not reinstated.

An OOo presentation goes over to ppt OK but you will almost always need to modify the display global parameters (page size or whatever) to get it right in PowerPoint.

Text processing is never, for me anyway, a problem but I've taken to using TextMaker from www.softmaker.de which, although less versatile for "save as" formats is much faster than OOo to run up and use, seems to have a much better .doc to native conversion and goes back to .doc flawlessly. It also gives me less trouble to and from .rtf than from OOo to be read by MS - quite why that is I have no idea!

Also, TextMaker offers elements of DTP which is most welcome (e.g. frames etc.).

-- 
Best wishes,
Derek