The letter, addressed to partners, and customers, presumably, was not able to be read using Lotus Symphony on my laptop for some unknown reason.
It was however read using Lotus Wordpro straight from the open or save dialog box in Firefox.
Yes that trusty word processing powerhouse alternative from another century opened it with no problem.
So now I was intrigued, what was the problem.
Upon further review the file was named SW, no extension.
I then logged back in to download the letter and saved it this time and gave it a .doc extension.
And this time symphony read it.
Evidently we have become so detailed to ONLY read files with an extension that makes sense, unlike the earlier heyday of Office suites that had to look at a file and just try to read it, no matter what the format.
So Wordpro is smarter than Symphony?
Wordpro which hasn't seen a major update in 10 years is significantly smarter than the Lotus Symphony Document app. It has a much richer feature set and I think it was light years ahead of its time.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how long it will take to catch up ?
I wonder, is there NO salvageable code in SmartSuite to bring it UP to date or is it all written in Win32 C or something?
ReplyDeleteI wonder why IBM think building an Office Suite based on slightly older OpenOffice code is better than renewing an amazing office suite they already have.
I guess/think/hope they have a good reason, even though I don't see it ;)
Zwirwel, I believe it was all in older code.
ReplyDeleteI think, if IBM was smart, they would be working to push the Symphony/OpenOffice to the web side of life.
And Adam, I agree, I miss the older products because they were more open to the reality that there were dozens of version of software out there, compared to now where there is only windows office suites usually.
We have used WordPro '95 for many years to publish complex newsletters. It is a very powerful program. I wished IBM had continued its development.
ReplyDelete