Thursday March 18, 2004

It's definitely a case of the something old/something new/something barrowed/something blue... there's a lot of stuff in Perl6 to like and yet it seems like some of the opportunity to unclutter the language appears to have passed us by.

Oh, darn.

Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are captured here ( Mar 18 2004, 08:41:25 PM PST ) Permalink


MS-Word to your mutha At first nobody I spoke to about work options cared about what format my resume was presented in; the plaintext I could generate via XSLT or the web-based resume itself was sufficient. Recently though, HR/recruiting types want to see it in MS-Word.

It never ceases to amaze me how a product such as Word can be so easy for the straight forward things but get so messed up as soon as things get a little complicated. I went through what I was planning on being a quick exercise in pasting the plain text in to Word's "Elegant Resume" template but I found that formatting defaults carried in by Window's clipboard were not desirable and in fact, the template itself had some things in it that required adjustment. Next thing you know, Word is crashing every other minute. At first I threw up my hands and tried getting what I needed to get done in OpenOffice but it's word processing application also blows as soon as you need to do anything slightly complicated. I went back to Word and finally got it to behave by walking through all of the table cells, selecting the text blocks and removing all of the pasted in formatting attributes; letting Word just use the default fonting attributes from the template seemed to make it much happier.

Well, it's done for now and posted online. Given how deficient the OpenOffice word processor is, MS-Word continues to be a necessary evil. And OpenOffice's only application that is remotely useful is the presentation (Powerpoint replacement) application. ( Mar 18 2004, 08:40:33 AM PST ) Permalink