[hblug] The docx problem

[Haydn]

Perry Spiller wrote:
> ----------------Earlier, you commented--------------------
>> gordon arnott wrote:
>>> ( most MS office users have no idea what "document format" means - 
>>> they just hit the save button )
>>>
>>> Simple solution
>>>
>>> Just save as   >> earlier version <<
>>>
>>> before you hit the <<  SAVE  Button  <<
>> Yes simple to anyone in this group - but you would be surprised how 
>> many people ( office staff etc ) who dont know or realise that you 
>> CAN choose to save as an earlier version. Or that there are options 
>> to be had.
>>
>> Hell, they don't even know where they saved it or what it was called.....
>>
>> I've spent many wasted phone calls to clients trying to walk them 
>> through that very process..! :)
>
>
> There are NO solutions that are simple. At least, not
> in the average office (as Chris emphasises). When
> I tired to explain to someone how to change the
> document properties to prevent a template from
> being over-written, you'd've thought it was a divine
> revelation. And that's an outfit that has a fairly
> large IT dept which regularly runs staff courses.
>
> Huh?
>
> Why would anyone (Except MS, for dubious reasons)
> need to compress a doc file on saving? It's not as if
> storage media is getting hard to find or dearer.
>
> Perry
>
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I can think of one good reason that MS would need to compress a doc 
file... messy xml!.. also it miay not actually be compressed and merely 
an archive form so that it comes as a single file rather than 2 or 3. 
Also for that matter (IIRC) when i was trying to open an odt or similar 
on a windows machine i found that it was also in the form of an archive, 
i assume for the reasons above.

Also harking back to the trial software issue I recently bought my 
laptop (which came with Vista) and found it had a trial of office 
2007... the interesting thing about this trial is that it is quite open 
to exploitation (in my eyes) as it allows 25 uses before entering a key 
and then (in my case) comes with a 60 day trial key. I, as a sparse user 
of office, have already got 2 months out of my trial without any key at all

I've just made a word file containing 'qwertyuiop' in the default font 
and found that this consumes a rather hefty 9.64kb (vs 10 bytes of 
actual data), when i change the extension to .zip i find 3 folders and 
one file in the root of the directory with probably a dozen or so other 
files contained in the folders which i have to say would be rather messy 
in the case of saving a file outside of an archive format, one of which 
containing the document content (qwertyuiop) and the rest (I assume) 
being xml stuff. On downloading an odt and renaming it to .zip i find 
again a rather large number of files so this portion is relatively simple

Haydn

PS I believe brett may have covered this since i started writing and 
apologise for any double ups