What's the fuss about?

What's the fuss about?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 13:57 UTC (Thu) by erat (guest, #21)
In reply to: What's the fuss about? by simon_kitching
Parent article: An opening for OpenOffice.org

The changing of defaults Word settings has been a peeve of mine for a number of years. I used to work at a Linux company whose non-technical staff used Word for just about anything that didn't require number crunching (including email, if you can believe that). Whenever they sent any docs to technical folks, we'd always have to send them back and ask that they be re-sent in plain text, PDF, or an option that you'd think they'd be able to handle, Word 95 format. Just about any word processor on the planet can handle Word 95 formatted docs. Nope, they wouldn't do it, even though their doc files used absolutely nothing that required the most recent file formats. Their excuse: "Everyone uses the new version of Word. It's not our problem that you don't." Follow ups asking that they simply change their default save format were met with the same response. They just didn't get it.

Once, one of our developers received a question from HR that was emailed to him in a Word file attachment. He emailed his response to HR in a .dvi file attachment. It didn't do much for inter-office relations, but screw it, they'd been doing it to us for years...

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