MS office & Open office compatibility issue

[Henry de Valence]

On Monday 10 March 2008 09:31:41 Howard Gibson wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 19:40:25 +0300
>
> "William Muriithi" <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Hi Gibson,
> >
> > >    Open Office spaces lines further apart than Microsoft Word does.
> > >
> > >    Instead of setting large, bold fonts, use the headers from the
> > > stylesheet, than attach a table of contents.  Tell the MS Word user to
> > > right click, then update.  Don't tell them how many pages you are
> > > sending.
> >
> > Do you mind explaining the second paragraph further. I am really
> > interested in it, but don't seem to understand it in its present form.
>
> William,
>
>    Microsoft Word and Open Office both use stylesheets for formatting. 
> Stylesheet are counterintuitive, and most people do not seem to 
understand
> them.  This makes Microsoft Word and Open Office quite a bit more 
obtuse
> than WordPerfect, which embeds formatting codes in the text.
>
>    Stylesheets are a powerful formatting tool once you understand them.
>
>    On either word processor, there is a toobar that lets you select a style
> for your current paragraph.  On my blank Open Office document, the 
toolbar
> says "Default".  If I pull the bar down, I see a selection of headings,
> plus some formats called "Text body...".  If I explore it, I will find all
> sorts of other stuff.
>
>    This is all much like stylesheets on the web.

In my opinion, LaTeX is much easier to use than MS Word or OOo or 
KWord for KDE3. You just type your text and it does all the formatting for
you. It's just that the command line is a bit intimidating to some. I'm sure
there are good LaTeX gui programs out there though.
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