Open Office -> Word problems (was RE: Cyber cafe article)

[Brian Kelsay]

Brian Densmore wrote:

> Speaking of OO and Word...
> I'm doing a document in OO put Everyone else who will use/
> maintain it uses Word. I found this
> really nice template for writing Technical documents.
> It has chapter headings and footers and indexes and
> pseudo-columned data. My problem is when I save it into
> Word format. The tabbed data shifts on some lines and not
> others, thus leaving the "columns" looking out of whack.
> I'm using a courier 10 pitch font for those.
> Secondly when I pull up the Word document the chapter
> headings in the headers are all fubared! So this means
> that I would basically have to hand edit every stupid
> "column" that is out of sync and hardcode in the 
> chapter names in the headers. Right now I am exporting
> the final document into PDF for user viewing, since
> none of the users will likely have OO. Any one seen this
> behavior before and possibly know of a workaround?
> 
> Thanks,
> "One of the other" Brians
>

I have seen this going the other direction, from Word to anything else 
(WordPerfect and OO, other versions of Word, the Lotus word processor). 
  This is why companies usually put all Word users on the same version. 
  Report your problems to the OOo team with exactly what format you are 
saving to and attach a copy of the OOo original doc.  I think they may 
have a place to put this in the bug reporting form.  It's just one of 
those humps we will have to get over.  You may want to look to see if 
there are any updates for your version, but you are running a Debian 
version, so that's probably not it.  Maybe there is a better or more 
MS-friendly template you can use.   I know it sucks, but you may have to 
  export the text only and then apply a style under Word and then do the 
header and footer.   PDF sounds like the best way, if no one has to edit it.

The other Brian.

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Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.