At 10:50 PM +0930 9/29/05, Tim wrote: >On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 14:26 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: >> When I use OpenOffice, and want to save something that I created using >> MS Office, I find that it frequently wants to warn me that >> I may be losing some special features. For this reason, >> I have abandoned using OO for editing stuff created with MSO. >> >> I don't know enough about these things to know whether anything >> in the files are actually at risk, but rather than lose them, >> I re-boot to Windows and do the editing there. > >Do a test... Usually, the warnings about things like how some document >formats mightn't support some styling effects, might not do tabs or >margins in the same way, etc. As a programmer, foolish warnings such as the above "All might not be safe" disgust me. If the code thinks that something might not work, the author is responsible for making it do the right thing. In this case, make the file in a temporary place (and this is the only responsible way to do it ever) and notice if anything didn't make it through the export process. If that happens, /then/ warn the user, tell them what got lost, and ask what to do. Such a warning actually means something that the user might care about. If they don't use any non-exportable feature in a document, they won't get any warning; if they do, they can at least decide whether to keep using the feature. ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
