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Comment by russellallen | Hacker News Reader

Every day I open, edit and share legal contracts and other Word documents. They're usually up to about 120 pages long, with reasonably simply formatting. They usually have marked up changes from about 2 to a dozen people.

Every six months or so I check out OpenOffice/LibreOffice to see whether the documents I'm being sent survive the open/edit/save cycle.

Every time so far I end up with a document with widely differing formatting from the original.

So at least for me, LibreOffice isn't suitable for my usage patterns.

I imagine other people are the same.

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This.

In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files. Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word.

Is there any good reason for this requirement, or is it just inertia?

If I'm submitting something read-only, PDF seems like the obvious choice. If you're going to edit it, maybe .doc is the solution, but really, Google Docs would make collaboration easier.

What does a Word file have that other solutions don't, other than mindshare?

>In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files. Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word. //

Which version? If they don't specify the version of Word to use for the files you're still playing roulette. The chances of getting an exact formatting match, for even a small document, across versions of Word use to be approaching zero.

Did they fix it?

not very related, but once i submited a post script resume (renamed as .pdf) for a webdev position, instead of the spify HTML that i usually send. (call it bucket testing:)

The hiring manager, who appeared to be clueless to any web technology or coding, complimented me by saying that my resume was the only one 'normal' without a bunch of code garbled in.

what a waste of time...

This is why I just STFU whenever I'm tempted to suggest "hey, why don't we use LO/OO?"

It's one thing to be able to open a foreign doc without an error/exception, be able to edit it, and then save it without an error/exception and even then be able to open it (without error/exception) with the foreign (Word) program. Etc, edit, back and forth, "look Ma, no exceptions."

It even looks really good, in isolation.

It's quite another thing to get exactly the same results from everyone using different programs (or versions of the same program) and then hope that everything matches up.

Above some size, it just doesn't happen, and I don't want to have to be the one that slinks away when the shouting starts.

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