Re: MS Word and complex documents
I'll have a look at the "save as" options in Word 2003 when I'm back in the office, but suspect still that a teachers edition of Office 2003 is probably the way ahead.
That said, I had this problem occasionally before upgrading to Word 2003 at work, just not so often, so I'm not certain that'll solve it.
In the meantime, I installed OO. Clearly it does everything I want in terms of functionality, but on a first try...
- It clearly uses enormous amounts of computing power, and my PC ran noticeably slower. Since it's a reasonably new 2.8GHz Celeron, this shouldn't be happening.
- It mucked up the format of my tables, although this was reasonably quick and easy to solve.
- Equations! Some of my equations it regarded as pictures and wouldn't edit. Some other equations, it would open - in a partial load of MS Equation Editor, but missing the "insert characters" bit, so whilst I could move the characters around, I couldn't insert any new ones that weren't on the keyboard.
- I saved it, then re-opened it in Word. Going down the page, everything was still fine, except the equations. Several (not necessarily ones I'd edited in OO) were mucked up completely and I couldn't recover. (They'd sort of turned into vertical lines one pixel thick, very odd).
So, first impressions are that it's sort of there but not quite. The amount of computing power it seems to use, together with the fact that it doesn't handle Word Tables or Equations all that well (and that I've got several Mb worth of them on my HD that I use, read, cut-and-paste from almost daily) works against it in my view at the moment.
But, I shall leave it on for a while and play.
G