[GLLUG] Crossover office

[eric.hein at us.army.mil]

It has been my experience that the MS .doc format save is lossy on format.  Personally, I see no reason to maintian a proprietary format in transfer of files.  Unfortunatly, the choice of format is the client's preference, not mine nor the wife's.  Whereas I can get MS Office for $60 with military discount.  I cannot get so lucky for XP and her computer is old enuff not to have OEM XP on it.  Shelling out the cash it what has me in a pickle now.  If her volume of work was higher it would pay for itself, but as it stands now, it is not worth it.

She contracts through another office in Ohio.  I tried to talk to there tech person and see about using OpenOffice, but they expressed specific reluctance to move to linux.  When I attempted to explain I was not driving for and OS change, I was simply trying to use a different(mostly compatable) application, their minds and ears were already closed.

I intend on doing some experimentation with working on OpenOffice and seeing if the formatting holds for at least some of the doctors she works for.  If it holds, I will try and submit some of the work and see if there are any troubles.

One would think when you are simply transcribing spoken word to text, that there wouldn't be all these specifics to worry about.  The formattin required is very simple and ascii with a text editor would suffice for 99% of what she types.  Go figure.

----- Original Message -----
From: Clay Dowling <clay at lazarusid.com>
Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 2:41 pm
Subject: Re: [GLLUG] Crossover office

> 
> eric.hein at us.army.mil said:
> > Greetings all,
> >
> > Is there much experience out there with crossover office 
> packages?  My
> > wife is an at home medical transcriptionist.  All of her clients 
> require> MS Office documents, so ditching MS Office is not an 
> option.  I would
> > however be interested in ditching windows on her machine.  The 
> only truly
> > windows specific app she uses is MS Office.  Is Crossover Office 
> generally> considered a quality and easy to use package.  The wife 
> is reluctant to
> > change things (more reluctant to learn new things).  I have a laptop
> > available to keep her up and running at the status quo during any
> > transition as well.
> 
> Make your life easier and use OpenOffice.  It will save to MS Office
> format and it generally works better.  The Calc application at 
> least is a
> much better Excel than Excel is.
> 
> Clay
> -- 
> Simple Content Management
> http://www.ceamus.com
> 
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