Last week I prepared my oldest company strategy writings and business plans for the next five years. The majority of the financial writings was done by one of my colleagues, who has great fundamental financial knowledge and a miracle "MBA" degree. Everything was looking quite nice until I understood that we are not just different guys, but we were using quite different platforms - I'm a Mac. And this is not just an ideology...
First, I faced a problem with the proper opening of his Excel files using my Mac. It's important to say, that my colleague is an Excel guru, so he always uses Excel and employs more expectations on it and on concrete digits - I'm a more strategy and art guy. Upon opening the Excel file, I experienced problems waiting for "MS Office 2008" to go through it. The time it took "Mac: MS Excel" to load the file gave me the ability to prepare the entire tea ceremony and make several phone calls.
The second problem appeared with a document file. When I tried to send it in PDF, my colleague protested and insisted upon receiving the proper "docx" version in order to see all of the proofs (changes) and most importantly, working with the document structure.
When I was exporting Pages to "docx", the content appeared at the document titles but was corrupted in the electronic document view of "MS Word". I was tired of converting and receiving bad user experience from my colleague. Due to the short amount of time left to finish the documents I switched to "MS Office for Mac" and started to compose the document there.
When I needed to send my document to the other colleague who has an older "MS Office" version, I switched to ".doc" format and then I copy-pasted his corrections to the "docx" version. The "doc" file was always 10 times bigger then "docx".
Finally after all of the corrections I tried to open the finished file in "Pages". I then tried to finish the layout of the document in Word, but I faced many well-known problems (from my "Windows experience"), i.e. when you want something and don't get what you ask for. So after several hours of trying to deal with decoration in "Word", I switched back to Pages and made all of the final designs in one hour.
I call this process cross-platform-business-writing-juggling. So I have a question. I pay a lot of money to "Apple" and know a lot about software and technologies (I'm not just another lame person) and my subordinates are nice guys. But why should we do this juggling instead of focussing on the document contents, after we've paid so much for hard and soft equipment? One other reason to change the industrial standards, and it's not just a "MS" evil, I know that Pages and Numbers are quite different things, but there must be a chance...
First, I faced a problem with the proper opening of his Excel files using my Mac. It's important to say, that my colleague is an Excel guru, so he always uses Excel and employs more expectations on it and on concrete digits - I'm a more strategy and art guy. Upon opening the Excel file, I experienced problems waiting for "MS Office 2008" to go through it. The time it took "Mac: MS Excel" to load the file gave me the ability to prepare the entire tea ceremony and make several phone calls.
The second problem appeared with a document file. When I tried to send it in PDF, my colleague protested and insisted upon receiving the proper "docx" version in order to see all of the proofs (changes) and most importantly, working with the document structure.
When I was exporting Pages to "docx", the content appeared at the document titles but was corrupted in the electronic document view of "MS Word". I was tired of converting and receiving bad user experience from my colleague. Due to the short amount of time left to finish the documents I switched to "MS Office for Mac" and started to compose the document there.
When I needed to send my document to the other colleague who has an older "MS Office" version, I switched to ".doc" format and then I copy-pasted his corrections to the "docx" version. The "doc" file was always 10 times bigger then "docx".
Finally after all of the corrections I tried to open the finished file in "Pages". I then tried to finish the layout of the document in Word, but I faced many well-known problems (from my "Windows experience"), i.e. when you want something and don't get what you ask for. So after several hours of trying to deal with decoration in "Word", I switched back to Pages and made all of the final designs in one hour.
I call this process cross-platform-business-writing-juggling. So I have a question. I pay a lot of money to "Apple" and know a lot about software and technologies (I'm not just another lame person) and my subordinates are nice guys. But why should we do this juggling instead of focussing on the document contents, after we've paid so much for hard and soft equipment? One other reason to change the industrial standards, and it's not just a "MS" evil, I know that Pages and Numbers are quite different things, but there must be a chance...