Re: [seul-edu] M$ Audits

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Thursday 25 April 2002 03:15, Stephen C. Daukas wrote:
> At 09:12 PM 4/23/2002, Leon wrote:
>> I can tell you some ripper horror stories about this very thing.
>> Secretaries who are bright but don't see the big picture. Years of work
>> put into templates, and then a a difficult-to-reverse forced upgrade
>> and... oops.

> Yes.  In fact, I found the best way to see if something really does eat M$
> files, is to use a test document with:

>          Multiple Columns, Forms, Breaks (page, column, and section),
>          Tables, and Styles

This kind of strife was generally about hand-laid-out forms, lines wrapped by 
spacing across, that kind of mess.

> P.S., is this the same Leon of StarOfficeWars?

Yes.

You'll be pleased to know that the office in question had their printer blow 
up, and the Windows genius in charge of replacing it (a very old Ricoh, no 
chance of an identical replacement even if they'd wanted to) *deleted* the 
old printer driver, with page defaults and all, before installing the new 
one. The new printer driver had very slightly different ideas about how big 
the paper was and where it could print on it, with the result that about a 
third of their `templates' broke.

This was one of two problems I then faced with StarOffice (and was blamed 
for). It was gratifying to see them run across the problem again without my 
involvement, but nobody involved has yet admitted to me that the problems 
were primarily with their documents.

The other problem was that StarOffice did not (at the time, 5.1 OTTOMH) allow 
the number of columns to change except at a page boundary. This did not 
impact all that many of their templates (something like 30 documents, maybe 
70-80 pages), and it would have been easily practical to rebuild the 
templates by hand using table features which Word did not posssess - in fact, 
I started doing this before they bailed out.

After an exceptional number of hits on that document from within an IP range 
owned by StarDivision (something like 35 different IPs from the range viewed 
it, the logs are no longer available to me since Smileys Internet shut down 
and phoenixed with a new and much more competent manager), the next version 
of StarOffice did support column changes mid-page. So in the end some good 
resulted from that whinge.

For the curious, the StarOffice Wars document was mirrored here:

    http://leon.brooks.fdns.net/old/smileys/StarOffice-wars.html

Cheers; Leon