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[Calvin Powers <calvin AT cspowers.com>]

At 08:49 PM 6/30/2001 -0400, you wrote:
> A Dimarts 26 Juny 2001 10:53, vàreu escriure:
> > Does anybody have experience with StarOffice, and in particular
> > StarOffice Calc?  I'm wondering how it compares to M$ Office & Excel.
> > The only reason I use Word is for interoperability with most of the
> > business world.

I bit the bulet and plunked down the money for the full version of Adobe 
Acrobat so I can generate PDf files out of anything that I can print. PDF 
format is now the format I use for inter-organization document transfers.

If both the sender and receiver have the full blown version of Adobe, you 
can use the comment functions to mark up documents. And these actually work 
as opposed to the comment functions in Word that keep getting screwed up 
and occasionally crash Word. Also, the person making comments can export 
just their comments and send back to the author, who can then import the 
comment files from multiple people into one PDF file. Yes, I know that in 
theory Word has similar functions. But my experience has been that the 
Adobe code works much better than the MS Word code.

So if I were able to dictate the standard office suite for an organization, 
I'd be tempted to say to use Star Office for intra company information and 
use PDF for inter-company communications and/or Star Office 
converters/exporters. One thing's for sure, you don't have to worry about 
those pesky "smart tags" with Star Office. (Or Open Office, or whatever 
it's called)

But then, no one has recently asked me to step in as standards dictator. 
:-( Maybe I need to polish my resume' some more.


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Calvin Powers                                             current events
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