Boston Linux Conference December 3-4

[Tom Buskey]

"Price, Erik" said:
>I hear you.  I don't like .DOC either, and when I wrote my resume
>a few months ago, I distributed it as PDF on principle.  (Also so
>that people don't try to examine the file's contents for "deleted"

When openoffice saves as .doc, you won't have all that hidden data in 
the file.  I bet abiword does this too.  If it's not in the native 
format, it won't get saved.  I hope any lawyer I word with a) doesn't 
give out electronic copies of its files and b) doesn't use word.

>data).  I was amazed at how many people said they needed Word 
>format.  Excel is another one -- I am amazed by how much data is

Everyone thinks word comes with windows so they assume everyone else 
uses it.  Plus many of the resume searching tools assume word format 
too.  Sending out a PDF instead of .doc can put you at a disadvantage.

>stored in an Excel spreadsheet (rather than a DB) by companies.
>I think Excel is fine for manipulating data, but it's not really
>an ideal storage format... (of course, it's easy and it's there
>[on windows] so people are going to use it).

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I 
remember seeing Lotus 123 macros to turn it into a word processor.

I agree with you on the storage format btw.


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Tom Buskey