The subject says it all. How very disappointing.
I have been able to export between Open/Star Office and Word for ages, allowing for the occasional glitch but Word XP (as well as requiring we actually telephone MS to register it in order to use it) now crashes un-recoverably when I open openoffice exported word documents.
I think that the XP stands for eXasperating Problems. The user experience has gone downhill and I am seriously hoping I can get hold of win2000 at a reasonable price in order to make this new laptop actually usable.
As for service pack 2 -- I don't think so! a) its nearly 100MB, b) it is so buggy that it can totally fuck your machine and c) it has even worse registration and DRM nastiness ensuring that RIAA, MPAA and MS control how you use it.
Guess I will have to save to RTF, copy that accross and then reformat the whole document all over again in word. Yeay for progress.
Re:Um...
nicholas on 2004-08-15T20:59:15
Well, strictly if any program crashes on invalid input then it's insufficiently robust, which is a bug. But I totally agree here that what we have is a problem that will need fixing in OpenOffice.
Re:Um...
TeeJay on 2004-08-16T10:04:58
yes, both need fixing.However Word is to blame, if OO writes documents that are valid in older versions of word, then similar problems can possibly be created by documents created in older versions of word.
Word should not crash because a document that worked with previous versions has been presented to it. Its just unacceptable. It can complain, warn and make do and finally refuse to load, but crashing and taking down XP for the N minutes it takes to persuade the process manager to open and then kill the bloody process by hand is a sign that it is badly written and designed.
