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Richard Koman

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Richard Koman

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Richard Koman

ARTICLES BY Richard Koman

PDF from Office? Forget it.

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 (XPS), which is is MS's challenger to PDF. The deal would have averted a potential

Critical Word flaw exposes users to malicious software

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, meaning a large outbreak is expected. According to News.com:
The malicious software arrives as a

A Word-ODF plug-in

A Word-ODF plug-in

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 percent of the testing is done for them," Edwards told CNET News.com on Friday. He said that the OpenDocument Foundation will respond to a request for information Massachusetts issued

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

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 percent of the testing is done for them," Edwards told CNET News.com on Friday. He said that the OpenDocument

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

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 percent of the testing is done for them," Edwards told CNET News.com on Friday. He said that the OpenDocument

The (really huge) problem of metadata in Word

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 Word's Change Tracking feature (even if you're not in more recent versions), Word is recording everything. Every user, every hard

The (really huge) problem of metadata in Word

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 Word's Change Tracking feature (even if you're not in more recent versions), Word is recording everything. Every user, every hard

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

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 back as either HTML, PDF, or MS Word. The problem is that the latter two formats are owned by entities that could

Should you junk Word for online editors?

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 .doc file out of the system at the