[Hidden-tech] Microsoft Office suite vs. other options

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Cheryl Handsaker wrote:
> Philosophy aside, I stopped using PowerPoint when the size of the 
> generated file exceeded my capacity to share it with the people who 
> needed access. Both Word and PowerPoint have become so "feature-rich" 
> that they are just too resource intensive to be useful to me, as an 
> occasional user.
>
>

That's an interesting point. The thing is that feature rich doesn't have 
to mean bloated. Bloated comes from a failure in the overall design 
effort as additional features are added. Worse is that the file 
structure becomes a rats nest that is many times larger than what is 
needed to store your document. Attaching Microsoft Office documents to 
emails that go out to the whole department is a mail manger's nightmare, 
as the document is overly large to begin with and then is replicated to 
every account that it was sent to, eating up space on the server needlessly.

If you open up a Word or Excel document in a text editor, you will see 
that the whole history of the document is there. All the edits, deleted 
text, everything. If you start with a document and re-edit it endlessly 
as you tailor it to each subsequent use, it becomes more and more 
bloated. But, what's worse, is that a subsequent client might open the 
document and see what you wrote to a previous client. I knew of an 
instance where someone got a quotation for something. They opened the 
Excel document in a text editor and saw that a lower quote had been 
given to a previous customer. They confronted the sales person with the 
lower price. The sales person was totally surprised and taken back. He 
had no idea how he had been found out, but had little choice but to cave 
in on the price.


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Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4