[X-Newbies] .xls

[Steven Rogers]

On Dec 16, 2005, at 6:18 AM, Vincent Cayenne wrote:

> At 2:20 AM -0500 12/16/05, Charles Martin wrote:
>> 95% or better of all the Word and Excel documents people receive  
>> were created by people who are just barely functional with the  
>> most basic featureset of those programs. In my experience, greater  
>> than 95% of the word documents I receive could have been sent as  
>> plain text with no change of appearance. The same goes for Excel  
>> Worksheets -- apart from the occasional bit of formatting (like  
>> bold, italic or some fancy font they have that I don't), nothing  
>> changes in 95%+ of the worksheets I get -- and I've opened many of  
>> them in Excel proper just to be sure of this. This is but one of  
>> the many reasons to hate Microsoft.
>
> I can think of so much to dislike about Microsoft but can't quite  
> follow the reasoning you use above. Perhaps there are some unstated  
> elements in the logic? It seems as though you're saying one should  
> hate Microsoft because people are "just barely functional with the  
> most basic featureset" of Word and Excel. By that reasoning, one  
> would vilify any and every maker of an email client...

When people send you plain text in word, send them back a reply in  
Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. If they complain, say all your friends  
have it, and use it constantly for email communications because its  
so convenient - and it runs great on the Mac and PC.

But I don't see what that has to do with hating Word or Excel. If  
someone sent you a plain text message in Maya, would you hate that  
program too? I'm having to strongly resist the urge to make political  
analogies . .

SR