4 ms·

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the th

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfortunately, keeps me a bit locked in. I suppose I could just run Wine...

_delirium 16y ago
That used to be the case for me, but around here the Office ecosystem has been increasingly fragmenting between versions--- some departments are all on Windows 7 with Office 2007, but quite a lot of machines are still on XP with Office 2003, and some folks (esp. on laptops) are using the Mac version of Office. The interoperability mess that causes is pushing people away from sending out Office file formats at all (mostly moving towards PDF), and to the extent they do, they choose save-as for some old version of Office rather than sending docx/pptx.
- SomeCallMeTim 16y ago
  I think the problem is worse than that. I've taken Word 97 files and tried to load them into Office 2007 only to have the document formatting be completely messed up. I mean, I've come to expect that when loading a Word file into OpenOffice, but to have it fail from one version of Word to another is pathetic.
- Keyframe 16y ago
  You can save as PDF from MS Office too. Adobe pushed Microsoft not to include that feature in installations though, but it's free for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d9...
AlexMuir 16y ago
PowerPoint and publisher are the two office apps that seem to be hardest to replace. But they're both ripe for web-based alternatives.
- squidsoup 16y ago
  I tend to make fairly minimalistic powerpoint presentations, so have found Google Docs presentations to be a good substitute.
squidsoup 16y ago
One thing I've noticed is that corporate adoption of wikis is slowly chipping away at MS Word's marketshare. There aren't many times when you genuinely need a word processor today. We still use MS Excel quite a bit - it's a good program.

_delirium 16y ago

That used to be the case for me, but around here the Office ecosystem has been increasingly fragmenting between versions--- some departments are all on Windows 7 with Office 2007, but quite a lot of machines are still on XP with Office 2003, and some folks (esp. on laptops) are using the Mac version of Office. The interoperability mess that causes is pushing people away from sending out Office file formats at all (mostly moving towards PDF), and to the extent they do, they choose save-as for some old version of Office rather than sending docx/pptx.

SomeCallMeTim 16y ago
I think the problem is worse than that. I've taken Word 97 files and tried to load them into Office 2007 only to have the document formatting be completely messed up. I mean, I've come to expect that when loading a Word file into OpenOffice, but to have it fail from one version of Word to another is pathetic.
Keyframe 16y ago
You can save as PDF from MS Office too. Adobe pushed Microsoft not to include that feature in installations though, but it's free for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d9...

AlexMuir 16y ago

PowerPoint and publisher are the two office apps that seem to be hardest to replace. But they're both ripe for web-based alternatives.

squidsoup 16y ago
I tend to make fairly minimalistic powerpoint presentations, so have found Google Docs presentations to be a good substitute.

squidsoup 16y ago

One thing I've noticed is that corporate adoption of wikis is slowly chipping away at MS Word's marketshare. There aren't many times when you genuinely need a word processor today. We still use MS Excel quite a bit - it's a good program.