[ale] OT: I mean way OT like DocX OT

[Scott Castaline]

On 07/14/2009 04:32 PM, Robert Reese wrote:
> Hello Scott,
>
> Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 4:03:20 PM, you wrote:
>
>> Had my first encounter with M$ DocX file. My son got the latest and
>> greatest(?), (Ok the not so great, okay okay,the latest and worstest)
>> M$Office. He sent us a document that he had created in it. My wife was
>> unable to open it on her State office issued laptop that has M$ WinXP
>> w/M$Office 2003.
>> ...
>> Told him to resave the doc in an older format, before
>> sending it to anyone else.
>
>
> Two things to offer:
>
> 1: Recommend RTF (Rich Text Format) as his default output for most things that need to be edited by others unless he's 110% certain the person to whom he sends the file has MS Office 2007.
>
> 2: Remind him that Word, Excel, etc. are EDITORS and not readers. (Now if I can get the other 99% of the world's users to understand that AND to understand email isn't for sending files, I'd be halfway to Nirvana.)
>
> If he does not want someone editing the file (it occurs to very few people that someone might edit *their* document) then to send it in a non-editable format, preferably in PDF; there are now so many free PDF creation softwares that not being able to send a PDF is something that can be quickly and readily remedied.
>
> A further benefit of PDF is that the vast majority of operating systems can handle it with little formatting issue and diminished font issues (if the fonts are embedded, that is).
>
> Cheers,
> Robert~
>
> P.S., There's a PDF creator built right into OpenOffice 3.x!  Send him a copy on a CD. ;cD
>
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I did have him converted to Ubuntu for a while, but he couldn't get a 
certain online game to work. I thought that he was dualbooting there for 
a while and using OOo2.x for all that stuff and just M$ Winblow$ for the 
game. Have to put a bug in him again.