incompatibility woes
A document I need to open is MS Word formatted and I don't have Microsoft Office on my computer. Now, if time was of the essence I could go down the hall, rouse my sleeping, flu-ridden roommate and use his computer. Or, head in to work or a computer lab and open it up there. Thing is, I shouldn't have to do any of these.
MS Office uses proprietary formats for their documents and I shouldn't have to pony up a few hundred dollars just to be able to read .doc files. Even if I had Word, if I had a different version of the software than the version used to create the document in question, I still might not be able to open it and the formatting is sure to be wacky. The other thing is that these files are prone to carrying viruses. Don't even get me started on how your privacy can be compromised by using Word- document revisions are such that there's more data stored in a file than just the final document.
I'm not saying everyone needs to go jump on the LaTeX bandwagon right now, but making widely distributed documents available only as Word files is like forwarding e-mail chain letters. We should be perspicacious enough to be over this by now.
These webpages here and here give clear reasons to abandon the Word bandwagon and contain links to pages with more information. Check it. (FQA forthcoming)
MS Office uses proprietary formats for their documents and I shouldn't have to pony up a few hundred dollars just to be able to read .doc files. Even if I had Word, if I had a different version of the software than the version used to create the document in question, I still might not be able to open it and the formatting is sure to be wacky. The other thing is that these files are prone to carrying viruses. Don't even get me started on how your privacy can be compromised by using Word- document revisions are such that there's more data stored in a file than just the final document.
I'm not saying everyone needs to go jump on the LaTeX bandwagon right now, but making widely distributed documents available only as Word files is like forwarding e-mail chain letters. We should be perspicacious enough to be over this by now.
These webpages here and here give clear reasons to abandon the Word bandwagon and contain links to pages with more information. Check it. (FQA forthcoming)