🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 10:12:50 -0500, Dave Garland
<dave.g...@wizinfo.com> wrote:

>On 4/23/2018 1:04 AM, Quadibloc wrote:
>> On Monday, April 23, 2018 at 12:00:04 AM UTC-6, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> 
>>> 	However the Word solution came with a bit of paper that said it
>>> would work and the Star Office one didn't and the bit of paper was deemed
>>> more important than evidence.
>> 
>> Yes, because the evidence only shows you about the documents that already exist,
>> while the bit of paper shows you about documents that will be generated in the
>> future.
>> 
>> Microsoft does come out with new versions of Word from time to time, other
>> companies will use them, and they will likely make changes that it will take
>> time for the open-source community to keep up with.
>> 
>Not just LO, but the changes will threaten everyone with older 
>versions of Word, too. And in 3 decades of supporting individuals and 
>small businesses, I can count on one hand (maybe one finger) the 
>number of times that any of those new features were ever used. I can't 
>remember a single client who used macros (most would have stared 
>blankly and said "what's that?"). I interoperated with them for a 
>decade or more using a copy of Word 97 and never experienced an 
>incompatibility greater than not having the same fonts installed.
>
>Near as I could tell, the new MS versions were mostly a way to goad 
>people into unnecessary "upgrades" and generate repeat sales. Some 
>people just  want the new shiny, and some were frightened when the 
>popup appeared that said "if you save in the old format, you're 
>probably going to break things". And some because people were sending 
>them documents they couldn't open any more.

They don't have to document decisions made anually by the board of
directors of a Fortune 100 financial services company.  That's one of
the things that I have to do.  The information needed is contained in
various Excel spreadsheets, memoes, datasets on the mainframe, APL
sharefiles, and assorted other sources.  We used to have to track it
all down by hand and key it into the document.  Now most of it is
sucked from the original source by a VBA script.  What tooks weeks now
takes hours and as we continue to refine the script expect to get it
down to minutes.

By the way, Word documents have been XML for several generations now.