It’s a call to improve on the Office Suite software available for Linux.\u00a0 Is this really something worth writing about? It is, and I’ll tell you why.\u00a0 After nearly 3 years at the same job, I find myself in a position shared by many\u2014seeking work in a struggling economy.<\/p>\n
The first thing I did was find a recent electronic copy of my resume.\u00a0 Good news!\u00a0 The most recent version just needed a little touching up.\u00a0 Since I don’t own Microsoft Office software, updating an MS Word doc should be simple using Open Office dot org, yes?? Supposedly Open Office does the job for Word Documents.\u00a0 Well, in my case…No.\u00a0 Abysmally, failingly, No. Broke almost all formatting of the original document.\u00a0 Caused me two to three times the work just to get it back to a ‘normal-looking’ state.\u00a0 Mind you my resume was not heavily formatted to begin with.<\/p>\n
Yes, fonts are a big deal when saving the document.\u00a0 For resumes, it’s important to use a highly-readable font and keep the font size nice as well.\u00a0 Chances are the resume will be scanned (for keywords) and also printed, faxed, and emailed to users of various Operating Systems.\u00a0 Keeping the font as generic as possible will help.\u00a0 Using exotic fonts that only come with Mac will not.\u00a0 To make my text documents play nice, I installed the msttcorefonts<\/a> (Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts) package.\u00a0 This package will let you use fonts commonly found on the MS Windows Platform.<\/p>\n No, it is not.\u00a0 I happen to like the Spreadsheet implementation.\u00a0 For basic spreadsheets, it works great.\u00a0 I have not tried to edit any MS Excel sheets with embedded macros (yet).\u00a0 This is (from what I’ve heard) is the tricky part where Open Office has to do a lot of extra work to try and match all the macro languages and formulas\u2014and on that\u2014I’ll give them some leeway.<\/p>\n Usually, the answer to this question (when put to a Linux user) is yes<\/strong>.\u00a0 With open source linux there are usually a plethora of substitutes available to try out.\u00a0 However, when it comes to professional documents, it “just has to work” as the cliche goes.\u00a0 I tried some text document office-suite alternatives.\u00a0 First I tried Abiword.\u00a0 Abiword also broke the formatting and made it’s own arbitrary decisions on font rendering, even though I had the correct MSTTCOREFONT installed (in this case, “Times New Roman”).\u00a0 So, with the correct Font installed, it didn’t matter.\u00a0 Document got very messed up.\u00a0 Other alternatives include purchasing a licensed CD of MS Office and to make it work in Linux, Crossover Office<\/a> (by Codeweavers), which I would consider purchasing.\u00a0 MS Office (however) is not high on my list of things to buy.<\/p>\n Abiword is not a bad program.\u00a0 I’ve written college term papers with it.\u00a0 This was a start-to-finish document saved as *.doc as opposed to a document created in MS Windows.\u00a0 I would just like to see Linux have the ability to inter-operate with .doc files that have a table as part of their layout.\u00a0 I’ve used and recommended Open Office both on the Linux and the MS Windows platform and it usually works great.\u00a0 Maybe I expected too much out of it?\u00a0 Maybe tables in an MS Word Doc are not consistently imported into Open Office.<\/p>\nOk, so is Open Office a total waste?<\/h2>\n
Your resume broke in OO.org; Can’t you use another app?<\/h2>\n