Have run Linux on and off for 15 years or so. Currently have dual boots with Win7 to Debian and Ubuntu on my two PCs. Never quite got to the point of solely running Linux - probably Ubuntu - on a main machine though. Though if the alternative had been Vista or Vista + worse, rather than Win7, maybe I'd be a M$ free household by now.

 

J.

I saw that. Can't see it making much of a difference really. Too much inertia to move away from MS Office.

I've been trying to get OOO and then Libra Office rolled out in a few places to save money but it's never happened.

I can see it happening. Hit save-as on microsoft office and it does fully support open document formats under powerpoint, excel and word. The read/write abilities in open document format in m$ office seem to be near 100% perfect with the exception of a few macro functionalities. As a result I work entirely in odt format now, m$ office will read it just fine and open office will handle it natively. Additionally on the rare occasion I have been sent a .doc or .docx and had problems with it, a quick email back politely requesting them to do a save-as in odt has resulted in complete co-operation on the other end (even from a very stubborn lecturer who has since adopted .odt across all of his files).

 

Originally I did my A-level coursework on school PC's in microsoft office of course saving as .docx. Libre Office did throw a total fit when reading it back. When I told microsoft office to save it as .odt, under microsoft office nothing changed at all. Under libre office it was completely identical to microsoft office. Sorted.

 

 

 

 

I actually dislike ubuntu. I use crunchbang although I am increasingly finding that there is no such thing as the perfect linux distro and that rolling your own is the only way to get what you really want.

I dont remember having a problem with .docx files; I will see if I still have any and give them a try.

 

I DID lose a lot of older stuff when the rozzers took and trashed my PCs, at one time I had back-ups of every email contact and email I have ever received or sent - going back to 1998; I HOPE they had a really boring time reading them all.

Depends on the file, plain text with perhaps the odd font size switch etc tends to come in fine from .docx, but my table from page 30 was hanging off the edge of the contents page for some reason.

We had problems with docx to start with but it was the firewall picking up an exe inside the file. Quite a few places had that to start with.