Re: A rewrite is long overdue...
@ ExampleOne
The problem is, as always, the "legacy". There are old documents that may still need to be rendered, using these old incantations, and no update is allowed to break them.
I don't disagree.
However, the Office team has a very loose definition of "break". The thing that drives me really crazy when people talk about "needing Office because of compatibility" is that Office isn't actually all that good at its own backwards compatibility.
If you open a document produced in Word 95, it's likely to look different anyway. Heck, I've held printouts in my hand and been looking at the document on screen - and noticed that the text is the same, but Word has interpreted the layout somewhat differently.
It's not an issue that results in data loss, but it's awkward trying to explain to someone why the "reprint" of an archived document has an extra page. Or worse, is "missing" a page!
(Part of this is probably due to printer driver changes over the years...)
I think at some point we have to face the fact that Office, especially Word, is crap at backwards compatibility. Provide those who care with a macro that saves all documents in a folder as .pdf, and move on.
There will be legal issues, as you say. But in those jurisdictions they already have a legal issue due to the current bad behaviour - they just don't know it yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
