export is important, too...

export is important, too...

Posted Jan 12, 2005 3:18 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
Parent article: Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0

Unlike "this reporter" (aside: that always sounds kind of stilted; how about "your reporter" for consistency with Jon's grumpy articles?), I've occasionally had the need to export MS formats, too. It would be nice to see some data on how (or if) that's improved, too.

For example, in Impress vs. PowerPoint, it's perhaps not surprising that partial transparency doesn't work right; that's a relatively new feature even in PowerPoint. (For the record, it doesn't work at all over RDP, nor via some of those web-based shared-meeting apps.) And font-rendering is always a little dicey, so one expects some sizing differences. But basic line-wrapping in text boxes is the sort of thing one simply expects to work, so I was rather dumbfounded that it didn't. (And it was broken in both directions, too: wrapped in OOo => not wrapped in PPT; wrapped in PPT => not wrapped in OOo.)

Since I encountered those problems in a couple of days' light usage (which accounts for nearly all of my usage over the last six months), I'd bet there are a lot more of them--particularly for Writer vs. Word. Any indication of export improvements in the release notes so far?

Greg

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