Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format

hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Ngarrang]

Why? Because some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use. They type in their stuff, use the equation editor, etc, done.

The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war, only the technical folks. It is a power that should not be wielded lightly, this format war.

It's not important that ...

[Tribbin]

It's not important that people will use open-source software for writing documents.

It's more important that MS supports ODF.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[twitter]

some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tribbin]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do.

Re: It's always a surprise

[Black Parrot]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do.

It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.

Re:backlash

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's just you.

Afterall, w(ho)tf owns a computer in 2007 that doesn't have hardware acceleration? .. and if you TRULY MUST run Vista on the PC you bought circa 1996, just turn Aero off, Vista works just fine in 2d.

As for the new Office UI, it is superior to the old in many ways. I realise that that idea is very hard for you to accept (not least b/c all you *nux/FOSS gearheads don't WANT to accept it), but I've been using Office 2k7 for a coupla months and I love it. I think if more ppl would quit pouting about the simple fact that it's DIFFERENT and actually spend some time getting used to it, they'd find that Ribbons and Task-groups are significantly superior to (and vastly more intuitive than) the many-layered, nested menus ever were.

As for the "incompatible" format, I'm not sure what you mean. Given that there's a FREE and easy-to-apply patch available here [microsoft.com] that enables any version of Office >= 2000 to use the new XML formats, AND since every Office 2k7 application has a highly visible and easy-to-use "Save as Office 97-2003" option, I really don't know what you're trying to say, oh, wait, I forgot about FUD, riiiight, I got it now...

-AC

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[larry bagina]

Science and Nature don't cater to people that spend all day writing emacs macros to prove their lambda calculus theorems, it's for people that wear labcoats and do chemical/biological research. I have a Master's degree in a cellular biology. I've worked with a lot of PhD candidates and tenured professors. Dozens of papers were published yearly. The secretary was more computer literate than most of them.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Black Parrot]

I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics.

People in math and many other sciences are not automatically computer savvy.

That wasn't my point. It's just that LaTeX is the de facto standard for generating professional publications in most of the sciences, mathematics, and CS. So when he says his journal's authors wouldn't know WTF tex is, I can draw the conclusion with reasonable confidence that his journal isn't in one of those fields.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

We're not being elitist, are we?

You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.

And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.

You know what? I'd rather that people not send me either. Don't send me ODF, don't send me DOC. Send me a damn PDF.

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Re:It's always a surprise

[kazem]

No, that's a really arrogant statement.

You must write in Latex. It's a more powerful for formatting and avoids exactly this problem. And no, they're not too busy to use it because using Word takes up more time in the long run.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Rakishi]

Well, I'm sure a lot of biologists at Stanford will be surprised to learn they're in a soft science.

Re:How strange

[Belial6]

If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents out of Word 1.0, they likely are hitting the piracy trail today. As things like software dialing home gets more and more prevalent, that might not be even possible 10 years from now. Storing corporate documents, that should be archived, in Word is simply irresponsible.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[porcupine8]

Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[porcupine8]

Fine, take a look at my professor from my master's program - a woman who has a chaired professorship multiple multi-million dollar federal grants going at any one time. She had to have me copy and paste something for her once because she couldn't remember how to do it. She would freak if asked to use anything but Word, because she's barely learned that.

Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him.

I could believe that being brilliant at computer science implies that you are on the cutting edge technologically and demand only the best for your computing. Being brilliant at math or biology or psychology implies no such thing.

(Though I will say, "superiors" is a bad choice of words. "IT Department," yes, but not superiors.)

Adobe did not sue Microsoft over PDF/Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe did not sue Microsoft about anything related to PDF creation in Office. Even the most irresponsible published articles on the subject only claimed that Adobe was threatening to -- and then, the ONLY source for that assertion was Microsoft themselves.

Think about it for a second. I'd bet it's ten times more likely that Microsoft was worried it could be sued by (just about anyone, Adobe, Nuance, whoever) if they included XPS generation in Microsoft Office, because then they'd be using their monopoly in an existing product to bootstrap the dominance of a new product (or in this case, format) -- the type of thing Monopolies get in trouble for. I'd bet their legal guys went like, er, we might get in trouble if we bundle XPS generation, we should unbundle it.

And then someone inside Microsoft went, well hey, that's going to be pretty stupid if we bundle PDF support but unbundle XPS support. That'd basically be a crib death for XPS. So let's hold PDF back too, and blame the whole thing on Adobe. Microsoft has been trying to claim that XPS is somehow more of an open standard than PDF anyhow, and spreading an uncorroborated rumor about Adobe being litigious about their format is totally harmonious with that strategy.

If this was just about Adobe and PDF, Microsoft would have unbundled PDF but left XPS support bundled in. No published report has explained how any possible Adobe "intellectual property" threat about PDF accounts for the unbundling of XPS generation.

The real truth is, Microsoft is holding back their PDF generation stuff because they can't afford to let it sit any higher on the totem pole than their support for their competing format.

I say bring on a Microsoft PDF READER. Apple has one. Adobe could use a kick in the butt to get competitive in the Reader department, and Foxit just ain't doing it.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bbtom]

LaTeX isn't just good for equations and other science-specific data - LyX and a decent BibTeX manager (I use BibDesk on OS X) are a great way of keeping large volumes of material well-managed for work in any academic field. Without LaTeX/BibTeX/LyX, I would have probably have never finished my (fairly research heavy) undergraduate dissertation (philosophy).

Now I have switched to XML-based formats and use XSL-FO and Apache FOP to turn it in to PDF/PostScript. I have complete control over the whole process and all of it is reusable, semantic and shareable. Add to that the use of the Web to share data openly, and we could potentially hit a nice sweet spot free of both Microsoft Office and it's lame duck open source clones. Part of the attraction of the open source world is getting away from Word and replacing it with semantic markup where I say what I *mean* rather than say what I want the document to look like. That's why OpenOffice et al. are utterly pointless. Open source should be about replacing bad paradigms rather than just porting.

I can't wait until scholarly journals just sit down and write an XML (RELAX NG?) schema and people use a schema-aware editor to write their stuff.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tim]

You'd probably be surprised how many of the "brightest minds" spend eight hours a day doing needless grunt work to accomodate the many peculiarities of Microsoft Office.

TeX and Word.

[twitter]

It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.

It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.

Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.

Editors and scientists and computers - oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors like things to be uniform. Their job is to get things to print properly at the end of the day - both from a writing and from an "interface with the printers" standpoint - and that's where things can get dicey when using a writing program that the PRINTING industry views an non-standard, which many small press publishers view anything other than Word and .pfd as being.

No, I am not talking about the larger academic publishing houses, but smaller journals often do not have the money to USE the higher-priced academic printing firms and have to play with the smaller companies, simply because these journals have circulations which are quite small, relatively speaking. This happens to people writing their dissertations all the time, too, especially when they have to use serious scientific notation in math, genetics or other graphically-oriented scientific notational areas of research, or have to use lots of color-specific photographs.

Small, short-run print shops are often run by people who are NOT the most capable individuals on the planet when it comes to handling even simple graphic placement problems, let alone handling scientific notational alignment issues and trying to tweak a (to them) unusual text creation program to properly interact with their press equipment. Especially with regards to notational placement and statements that they simply have no clue as to where anything SHOULD go, of course...

Don't believe me?

Ask ANY small-run magazine editor about Printers. You will get an education in a new area of single-strand virology that masquerades as marginally tool-using anthropoids! But beware! The language that they use will be neither pleasant, nor fit for polite company. In some cases, drunken veteran members of the Merchant Marine Service have been known to tell these people to mind their language during such discussions - it can get THAT bad!

Just a word from the other side of the desk - the editorial side...

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Of course if those people had any clue, they'd realize that file formats matter in the long run and if they use popular word processors, they will probably not be able to reopen their own documents 100% accurately in ten years time.

/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.

/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.

Sorry, looks like you're wrong on that one.

Re:Journals

[NanoProf]

Depends on the journal- the mainline Americal Physical Society journals (Physical Review A,B,C,D,E,Letters) accepted LaTeX (made their own macros- RevTex) for years before accepting Word.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[PDAllen]

When you use LaTeX you get what you wanted fairly quickly, and it comes out the same on any computer anywhere, and you end up with PDFs that do the same, so you can take them to a conference. And journals accept it.

When you use MS word it takes forever to get anything like what you wanted (subscripts on superscripts, tower-type functions?), then when you change something elsewhere in the document or email it to a coauthor something breaks and the equations get changed. And you end up trying to use powerpoint to do presentations, which means you take it to a conference and what appears on the screen is a bunch of hearts and spades instead of the right symbols (seen this happen, just once). Which is why journals generally don't accept it.

LaTeX predates MS word, anyway. Before that, you sent a handwritten or typed paper to the journal, which again isn't going to get there and have all the equations different to how they looked when you wrote it.

That said, if I was trying to write a paper with lots of detailed diagrams I might not want to use LaTeX; it's fine for line and block diagrams (which is all I need for combinatorics papers) via xfig, but I wouldn't want to try to, say, draw some anatomical thing. And it doesn't really seem to handle jpeg inclusion very nicely.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Romwell]

Why LaTeX?! Anyone who ever used LaTeX extensively would find your question insane. The brief answers is - because it is much more convinient, powerful, user-friendly; because it is takes much less time to LaTeX a document than to type it in Word; because Word was never meant to be a typestting/publishing tool, and LaTeX was... It's like asking "You can move around on a wheelchair, why use feet ?"

Re:Journals

[XenonChloride]

Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal?

Yes. ACS (American Chemical Society) journals (e.g. J. Phys. Chem.) and Elsevier journals (Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron Lett., J. Photochem. Photobiol., to name a few) DO accept LaTeX submissions!

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sangui5]

I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

This smells of the 80/20 rule in Office: 80% of the people only use (or even know about) 20% of the functionality. Being good at formatting math is just part of the functionality of LaTeX. There are lots of things that LaTeX is good at (and Office stinks at), which would probably be quite useful to you.

1. PDF Publishing. Nowadays, if your paper isn't published on the web as a PDF, it isn't nearly as influential. Some people won't even bother reading it. Now, if you're on a Mac, publishing to PDF is pretty good, but no such luck for Windows. You have to buy Acrobat separately.
2. Citations and bibliographies. Hmm, LaTeX comes with BibTeX; I haven't manually generated a citation or a bibliography entry since forever. I don't even have to write the BibTeX; just Google "paper title + bibtex" or check one of the standard online sources. Office has minimal support for bibliographies; guess you'll have to buy EndNote.
3. Support for concurrent editing. LaTeX lets you split up your sections into multiple chunks; indeed it encourages you to do so. So I can be working on one section and my coauthors can work on others. Now, truthfully, we *do* use RCS to synchronize, but we've done it without it. Or you could be fancy and use CVS or SVN and have concurrent editing of the same file. Word, um, can't do that. At all.
4. Automatic formatting. It always amazes me that people are willing to fight with Word to get their document to meet a formatting requirement. In LaTeX, I just download the style file provided by the conference. Now, Word does have templates, but they seem rather fragile to me, and while Science and Nature may give templates (I don't know), some other journals do not.

Really, Office isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be. And LaTeX isn't nearly as hard; especially if you use one of the WYSIWYG editors.