Comments | mellowtigger: what's a good document type?

mellowtigger

what's a good document type?

Mar 04, 2010 11:58

I need a kind of document that can be edited on any computer platform without someone having to pay for programs to install. It needs to work without someone having to lower security settings on their pc. It needs to allow a person to enter data within specific fields in the document. It needs to be small enough that people can easily email it ( Read more... )

work, internet

Comments 6

ohbrett March 4 2010, 18:07:55 UTC

This may not work for your needs but I have found Google Docs to be helpful with collecting data. You can build a spreadsheet that has a public input page with forms, radio buttons, drop downs, etc... that you can direct people to fill out and it saves what they input into the Google spreadsheet. I believe it's private, but like I said may not be quite right for what you need. Just an idea.

foeclan March 4 2010, 18:11:17 UTC

.doc (Word 97/2000) is the de facto standard. Even without Office installed, Windows comes with WordPad which will handle it. Any Linux distro worth downloading has half a dozen applications that can read .doc. Fairly certain that OS X can even read it without Office.

There is OpenOffice, which is huge and bloated but free. It will, of course, save its files by default in its own format that can only be read by OpenOffice, so it's a worse option than .doc (which it can read and write if you specify that).

bitterlawngnome March 4 2010, 18:17:13 UTC

Because Adobe and Word are never going to stop trying to own the field. Industry has no incentive to stop making you buy multiple softwares, and updates for each as often as the MBAs determine they can get away with.

In short the answer is that there is no one format that does everything you list here.

Have you looked at Open Office?
http://openconcept.ca/openoffice

furr_a_bruin March 4 2010, 19:13:20 UTC

Other than the already-mentioned OpenOffice I don't know of any free alternatives for Linux or OS X, but for dealing with .doc files on Windows, there's Jarte. It's free and small, though the user interface can be quirky.

iWork's Pages on OS X is reputed to be able to deal with .doc files, but that's commercial software.

I've never worked with Google Docs, but that sounds like an option worth exploring.

pi3832 March 4 2010, 19:48:00 UTC

You're asking the wrong questions. What are you trying to achieve? Not the computer stuff, but the real world stuff?

I struggled with similar problems, and in the end I used ASCII .txt files.

PDF sucks, because while PDF is an open standard, the Adobe Acrobat Reader won't play well with PDFs generated with non-Adobe products. (They'll display fine, and you can even enter data in fields, but you can't save the updated PDF file. Fuck you, Adobe.)

Open Office is a great free and open-source replacement for MicroBloat Office (I've been using it exclusively for four years now and have never looked back), but all of your users would have to download and install it.

Google Docs, AFAIK, would either require all of your users to have a Google account, or would have you manually adding access for everyone. And wouldn't provide any privacy for users.

MoinMoin is a good wiki that supports an acceptable WYSIWYG editor, but even then, IME, non-geeky people really don't want to go there. And it doesn't support buttons or drop-downs or ( ... )