Well, I had a long meeting today with our new I.T. support partners. Damn, but it's good to work with competent people who are enthusiastic about doing business with us. We talked about the new server that we are hoping to implement very shortly, and not only did the support company guy have some damn good ideas, but he was positively relishing the challenge (the migration is not going to be easy).

I have a really good feeling about this.

Here's the scenario.

We have a word document. It appears to be corrupt as every time one tries to open it in Word for Windows, Word dies painfully.

Wordpad doesn't want to know. OpenOffice/Win opens it, but it's badly garbled (lots of random junk in the text).

Let's try on OS X:

NeoOffice opens it, but it's still a bit garbled - strangely it's far more readable than in OpenOffice for Windows (Gawd knows why, Neo is built from the same codebase - mebbe my version of Neo is just that bit later, dunno), but the formatting is seriously screwy.

Nisus Writer Express also opens it, but again the formatting is out.

I can rescue the file from either one if I have to with a little work, but I keep trying...

MS Office: Mac. Just sits there. At least it doesn't crash, but it won't open the doc at all

Pages '08. Opens the file. Highlights the fact that the problem is with an unimportant embedded image, which it doesn't try to display, showing only a black box, but DOES let me delete from the file. I save out to Word format. The file now opens in Word for Windows without further issue.

iWork '08 is most definitely a keeper =]

So I changed the background colours around a bit. I've no clue why you want to read this nonsense, but I hope you find it easier now ;-)

I'll also try to watch the language in future *grin*

You remember that post from a while back talking about Apple releasing my ideal computer?

Well, I just took delivery. It's a 17" MacBook Pro with 1920x1200 high-res glossy screen, 160gb 5400rpm HDD, DL DVD burner & 2Gb RAM. It's so much faster than the G5 it's embarrassing, and XP runs under VMWare at pretty much native speeds (at least compared to the 3Ghz P4 machine I use at work).

Without a doubt it's the best computer I've ever owned.

Gripes? Not many. I'll admit that I wish Apple had followed HP's lead and added a numeric keypad to the 17" model (the HP's keyboard has a better feel, too), Apple REALLY should use some of the spare space in this machine to allow fitting of a second hard drive (also present in the HP) and..... errm..... that's about it, really.

Now I get to look forward to Leopard. =]