> > I'm interested in what people do on this one. > > > > Suppose you output a report from your favourite genealogical program > > in say DOC or RTF format because you want to put it through some > > manual editing in a word processing program. > > > > What is it you want to do? Is it to tweak the content (sounds a bit > > dubious - why wasn't it right in the first place)? Or perhaps you > > want to massage the appearance in some way. > > > > Peter J Seymour <mozng@pjsey.demon.co.uk> > > If I understand your question correctly, I'd think much would depend > on the output of your report generator. I have one, for example, > which will output date and place of death, even for living persons, > when the "show all events" option is selected. Now, even though the > output for living persons is something like "He died on _____ at > ____", the fact it appears at all is annoying and more than a bit > off-putting (took me a while to connect the output with selecting > that particular option, BTW). That's point one. 'Nother thought is > that you might want to rearrange the way the facts are presented, or > combine notes or modify any of a number of cosmetic things that your > report generator does well (good enough for government work) but not > as you might wish. Font, layout, pagination, indexing, title page, > table of contents, addition of graphics - there's a whole slew of > things you might want to "play" with to get the report to look the > way you want it. > > But the primary reason you might want to run the report through your > wordprocessor might be to convert it from, say, .doc or .rtf to, > say, .pdf or .ps. To my mind, anything that's MicroSoft or Apple > specific is immediately suspect and automatically goes to the bottom > of the pile for later conversion. (Notwithstanding that some 95% or > more of personal computers run some version of Windows or MacOS, > there are some who choose to run neither and may not be able to do > anything with those proprietary formats. As a result, you've wasted > your time and machine cycles preparing a report they'll likely never > read and have probably annoyed them more than just a little bit.) > > Swell Ol' Bob Melson Agreed except OpenOffice runs on most machines and not only deals with the formats mentioned, but many others. And in fact when I had office 2007 on one machine and XP on another exporting from 2007 in 97/xp/2003 format came up unreadable on an xp machine. Openining and re-saving in OpenOffice saved the day, office XP could now read the file. I have 'strong opinions about the quality of Micro$oft software, few favorable. MickG Mick <mickg01@verizon.net>