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

[Robert Heller]

At Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:31:11 -0500 Chris Hoogendyk <hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu> wrote:

> 
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> 
> 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.

And if you ever look at the HTML generated by MS-Word you will find it
contains many, *many*, totally useless bits of HTML: things like empty
<span>s, colored &nbsp;s, colored &nbsp;s in some random font, bolded,
in italics.  This suggests that the doc file also has bits of nothing
with complete text attributes.

There is also the case where a contractor embeded the quote from a
sub-contractor and the embeded quote was discovered (both the lower
price AND the name of the subcontractor (guess how that ended up).  The
law firm whose brief contained the complete in-house history of the
development of the document. MS-Word documents can be *toxic* for
almost *any* business.  It is only luck and the fact that most people
who are sent these documents are not clever enough to dig into the
documents beyond the 'surface', because much of the time the senders of
these documents are not clever enough to 'sanitize' them before sending
them.  These sorts of problems can't happen with PDF attachments, since
PDF files are a 'concrete' version, in *exactly* the same way as a
hard-copy is, since a MS-Word to PDF converter is little more than
effectively a print-to-file type of operation.

> 
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
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