Office X interoperability - who should fix?

[olofh]

An Office X .doc containing a .tiff image (for example a diagram copied from Excel and pasted in) will not open correctly by Office for Windows. Windows will start looking for Quicktime while opening the file, and since most MS Win users do not have QT installed, the image is unavailable.

Workaround: Use an imaging program to save the image as .jpg, and re-insert it into the word document. Not elegant.

This problem was acknowledged by M$FT during a contact I had with their support.

Now, is this a problem caused by OS X (Apple), by the sending application (Office X) or by the receiving application? Who should take responsibility?

I run into this problem several times a week in my job, and I'm sure many people share my view that this should get a solution.

Any thoughts on this?
Olof

[Giaguara]

Microsoft wrote the program Office. The problem occurs only in Office, which is a M$ product.
Thus they should fix it.
E.g. simply making the code changes to the program save the graphic in some other format, when save to Word .doc for Windows.

[Viro]

Why should Apple have to fix MS Office or Windows? It's a MS problem since they both write Office (doesn't have a built in tiff reader on Windows) and Windows (for not having native tiff support that Office can use).

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Neither -- it's up to the user to fix it. If they want cross-platform compatibility, they should take the time to research what file formats are truly cross-platform (like JPEG) and what formats are not (TIFF for example -- it can be encoded as "Windows Byte Order" or "Macintosh Byte Order").

It's like someone arguing whether Apple or Microsoft has the responsibility of "fixing" the problem of Windows not being able to "mount" .DMG files. The answer is straightforward and possibly brutal: do some research and find out what compression formats are supported by all the OSs you wish you access the file on. Then compress the file that way.

It's not Microsoft's nor Apple's problem, as I suspect properly encoded TIFF files would function just fine on their respective platforms. Encode a TIFF file for Windows, and it'll probably show just fine on Windows. Likewise, encode it for Macintosh, and you're good to go on a Macintosh. Encode it as JPEG, and you're probably good to go on both platforms.

[olofh]

I agree with Giaguara and Viro. It is a M$ product, and it causes problems when moving from Mac to Windows, not the other way around. Microsoft should fix it.

ElDiabloConCaca seems to work professionably with graphics, and speaking for that group of people, he is right. Professionals should know what kind of graphic material they are working with and deal with it accordingly.

That is of little help for the rest of us. Ever since the Mac hit the market 20 years ago (was there, had both mac and t-shirt) Apple's philosophy has been to isolate the users from the complexities of computers and geekspeak. Things should just work.

I now realize this is the wrong forum - postings here are not read by M$...

I'll just send .pdf docs to my workmates in the future.

[chevy]

.png is now the best format. Nearly as compatible as jpg, with better compression and quality.