Many months ago, there was a notification that MSO2013 changed their XML formatting from a "loose" to a "strict" version of the format. I do not remember the exact wording but they stated that MSO2010 may not read MSO2013 files correctly. So that makes 3 releases of MSO on Windows that are not compatible with MS's own XML based formats. EVERY time they release a new version, since 2007, they require the user to buy the new version to be compatible. They there is the big hike in buying their office suite, since renting will give MS more income from the same user. You get a lower up-front cost but a higher total cost when you rent MSO. All this incompatibility is just a scheme to increase their income.
As for rendering differences between different versions of Windows, XP through Win7, yes MS admits that as well. Between different font bundles and differences in how the OS does it rendering, I do not know what the differences are, but I have seen the differences myself sometimes. I ran XP/pro and Vista. Now I have XP/pro and Win7/pro. Yes, sometimes documents look a little different between the two MS OSs. Since I use Ubuntu/Linux for my main desktop, and I have not bought a MSO package since 2003, I rarely have to deal with working with MSO myself, which I enjoy.
On 02/05/2013 09:10 AM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :) Only MS Office 2007 and 2010 are available on Mac. They are re-named as 2008 and 2011 but basically are pretty much the same. However there are compatibility issues with documents produced on one platform and then viewed on the other. Documents produced with 2007 don't always look at all right on 2010 let alone 2011. If produced in 2010 on Win Xp then even MS admits they wont look right on 2010 on Win7, nor Win8. Their idea of 'compatibility' is that everyone must be using the same version on the same OS. Also while a student may not be considered to need various different parts of MSO it is still often claimed that moving away from MSO might be a bad idea for them because it means doing without those apps that are not even included in their version of MSO. Then there are tons of other bundles that each lack different parts of the whole suite. Again the missing parts are used as reasons why people can't migrate away from MSO. I have just been helping 2 students on courses that are allegedly trying to teach about computers and the Access module parts were particularly tricky as they didn't have Access at home despite having bought the version of MSO that the colleges recommended. So many different bundles = so much confusion. Rtf is no longer being actively developed. Also, as is typical of MS formats, it fails to be compatible between different programs or even same programs on different OSes, let alone different platforms. I've never yet met any office worker using Biff. Almost all serious servers run non-MS platforms. Somewhere around 1%. Mostly it's small company servers but again they tend to go with unix-based platforms because of security issues. Mobile devices seem to almost entirely run non-MS. The Slate's sales have been appallingly lower than estimated. The only person i know of that has run a Windows phone found it started crashing after just 2 weeks and at best is suffering slowdowns already. All the 3rd party tools for reading documents that are in MS formats tend to be better at displaying LibreOffice documents because it's usually their native format too. Regards from Tom :)________________________________ From: Urmas <davian818@gmail.com> To: users@global.libreoffice.org Sent: Tuesday, 5 February 2013, 14:07 Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Re: LibreOffice 4.0 "Tom Davies": On the other hand MS Office still does not support many features of LibreOffice yet either. Like custom toolbar backgrounds? I think people can live without those.For example the Student's version of MSO doesn't include Publisher or Access.Why does a student need Publisher? Why does they need Access when they can have the real SQL server for free?Plus their default formats ... only really work on desktop machines.Both BIFF and RTF are trivially parsed and can be used on servers as well.Will MSO ever catch up on security or cross-platform compatibility?There are third-party solutions which handle Office documents on mobile devices. The two only desktop platforms, Windows and MacOSX are both using MSO. What compatibility? -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
-- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted