AllBusiness.com - Word Smith

PDF from Office? Forget it.

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 10:37:16 GMT

Wouldn't it be nice if you could create PDFs directly from Office apps like Word? Sure it would. As it stands now, you pretty much have to pony up $500 to Adobe for their writer, or seek out some of the software created by (very) small publishers. Unfortunately, negotiations between Adobe and Microsoft, which would have allowed Office 2007 to spit out PDF, have broken down. According to AP, Adobe wanted Microsoft to charge for the service, as well as for Microsoft's own XML Paper Specification ...

Critical Word flaw exposes users to malicious software

Thu, 25 May 2006 11:29:12 GMT

On May 19, Symantec identified a new flaw in Word that exposes users to malicious software that opens a "back door" into your computer. Yesterday, Microsoft released a security advisory that advises running Word in safe mode until a patch can be made available in mid-June. The flaw is exploited when you double-click on a Word file attached to an email message. The threat is not theoretical. A large Japanese enterprise has been attacked, and Symantec has raised warning levels to Level 2, ...

A Word-ODF plug-in

Thu, 11 May 2006 11:08:07 GMT

As governments start to standardize on the Open Document Format instead of Word, a big concern has been on mitigating the cost of the transition. Now an open source programmer has developed a plug-in that will allow Word to read and write ODF files, News.com reports. But the plug-in won't be made available until state governments like Massachusetts vet the software. "We'd rather have a level of validation that is worthy enough so that when other entities want to consider OpenDocument, eighty ...

A Word-ODF plug-in

Thu, 11 May 2006 11:08:07 GMT

New plug-in will allow Word to read, write ODF files

Tue, 09 May 2006 03:36:40 GMT

New plug-in will allow Word to read, write ODF files

Tue, 09 May 2006 03:36:40 GMT

The (really huge) problem of metadata in Word

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 05:05:18 GMT

Imagine you're working on a proposal to another company. You write it in Word, you send it to your associates, your boss your boss's boss. They all make additions, cuts, comments. They paste in copy from other documents. Perhaps the information is confidential. Perhaps someone pastes in some recent sales data from Excel. Any scenario you choose, where multiple people are working on a document that includes some information you don't necessarily want your competitors to know. If you're using ...

The (really huge) problem of metadata in Word

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 05:05:18 GMT

Doing business with state governments? Office format wars may affect you

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 04:48:31 GMT

A story last week in Information Week shows that governments are increasingly moving towards open formats for Office documents. This time it's Minnesota, where legislation would dictate open standards for all government documents. That means that vendors doing business with the state would have to switch away from Microsoft Word (and possibly, PDF) in order to comply. In conducting a theoretical search of the Minnesota state Web site, [a state employee] observed that most of the results "come ...

Should you junk Word for online editors?

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 08:30:02 GMT

A few weeks ago Google acquired Writely, an online word processor that supports Word and XML formats. Here's word of another such app - AjaxWrite - which claims to free you from the need for Word at all. The apps are definitely interesting. They sure don't provide all of the style management, mail merge, long document indexing, etc, capabilities of Word, but how often do you use those features, and how often do you simply format for presentation? If you mostly do the latter, and you can get a ...