[Gllug] Puke - Berlin Bundestag will switch to Outlook and Exchange

[Christopher Currie]

On  Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:02:08 +0100 John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk> wrote:

> It may not meet everyone's definition of Open Source, but I noticed the
> other day in PC World that they use OpenOffice.org as their standard
> office suite on all their PCs.  The chap I was talking to seemed to be
> quite oblivious of it - "All the software is controlled by Head Office".
>
At work we have been using M$ Word 97 to extend & sort, once a week, a 
growing 'database' (actually a Word .doc file alphabetised by paragraphs) for 
some years. As the file grew, Word 97 became unable to sort it. Increasing 
the RAM on the PC kept it going for a few weeks but it started to hang again.  
I assume that the number of paragraphs exceeds some array-dimension or key 
limit in Word.

The PC & network support company has recently upgraded the Word to Word 2003, 
which they were confident could cope with larger files, but after a couple of 
weeks that's also saying the 4-MB  file is too big for it to sort. 

I can, however, sort it with Open Office.org 2.0 run from a U3 stick (would be 
better from a Portable Apps stick). That's not ideal as O.O.o always lets a 
few odd paras float to the top with intruded leading spaces, which then have 
to be tidied up and resorted (I assume that the leading spaces are hidden in 
the Word doc gunk but that Word had some flag telling it to ignore them).

I can also sort it at home using O.O.o 2.0 on Linux, but there could be font 
problems.

It seems to me that, as we are physically moving office next month, it would 
be reasonable to ask the bosses and the support company to install O.O.o on 
the system after that, but I may encounter some resistance. 

Any other software solutions that people can suggest? (I can't imagine the 
bosses agreeing to convert the PC to dual-booting with Linux). 

We have two similar smaller 'databases' which are still Word-sortable and 
likely to remain so for some years, and copies of the files need to be 
mailable to one or two staff to work with at home. So I don't want to suggest 
a proper relational database system, which would seem to be a sledgehammer to 
crack a walnut.

I'll be away for a couple of days, so apologies for not being in a position to 
thank people immediately for any helpful comments offered.

Christopher
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