a little help & alot of mental advice please(solved&thanks)

[satelight7430]

hello to all
and thanks for puting up with my rant!!
up till this point, I have been very passive about the winblows vs linux battle.
whenever i was asked to help with an os, i helped and many times put my best foot forward
and did things out of the goodness of my heart(time&money).but as of today,I am hell bent
on an alternitive!! I have come across a problem from one of my children. we were asked to help
a child of ours(fineaclly) and as any good parent I've asked what her grades were. So the school
has sent us a transcript, in a xps format. low and behold I could'nt open it with any thing in Ultimate Edition!!
I've searched and did some digging and still nothing!!I had to bow down to micro$oft and load up my xp
(wich has'nt been started for months) and see what was being sent to me!!
up till now everything has been a piece of cake.wine has filled in when nothing else would work and did it wonderfully!! I am having a hard time beliving that nothing will work first,this is were I'm asking for help.
what can i do to open this up!! I understand that M$ is not a open platform and everything is as hush,hush
as possible. but to make a format that only your product can use is rediculous!!
I know there is other items of the same nature out there & thee mahn has done his best to fill this
hole but to be pushed(shoved) like this from a school & forced to usesomthing is crazy...
please,please give me your 2 cents about this.so i can mabie,mabie come to a reasonable concolusion!!
I'm so ticked about this I see all my misspelling and just dont care,do i let the f--ken school
rule my life when I,m paying there salary!! its not right & i'm spitting mad!!
thanks for letting me rant.
pbs

[deate]

hello to all
and thanks for puting up with my rant!!
up till this point, I have been very passive about the winblows vs linux battle.
whenever i was asked to help with an os, i helped and many times put my best foot forward
and did things out of the goodness of my heart(time&money).but as of today,I am hell bent
on an alternitive!! I have come across a problem from one of my children. we were asked to help
a child of ours(fineaclly) and as any good parent I've asked what her grades were. So the school
has sent us a transcript, in a xps format. low and behold I could'nt open it with any thing in Ultimate Edition!!
I've searched and did some digging and still nothing!!I had to bow down to micro$oft and load up my xp
(wich has'nt been started for months) and see what was being sent to me!!
up till now everything has been a piece of cake.wine has filled in when nothing else would work and did it wonderfully!! I am having a hard time beliving that nothing will work first,this is were I'm asking for help.
what can i do to open this up!! I understand that M$ is not a open platform and everything is as hush,hush
as possible. but to make a format that only your product can use is rediculous!!
I know there is other items of the same nature out there & thee mahn has done his best to fill this
hole but to be pushed(shoved) like this from a school & forced to usesomthing is crazy...
please,please give me your 2 cents about this.so i can mabie,mabie come to a reasonable concolusion!!
I'm so ticked about this I see all my misspelling and just dont care,do i let the f--ken school
rule my life when I,m paying there salary!! its not right & i'm spitting mad!!
thanks for letting me rant.
pbs

Perhaps if you can shed some light as to what they sent you that you classify as "xps" format, we can offer some help...Like what type of file is it??? Perhaps a .doc file written in " MS Word"???

[Baphomet]

This issue raised hell on my college campus several months ago what with the .xps format and the (non-backwards compatible) .docx formats. Personally, I can't help but think that MS is over-playing their hand trying to go head-to-head with Adobe's .pdf format. At least I hope so.

Dear GAWD how I hope so.

[DaddyX3]

It appears that if you are running KDE4 (1.9 in a different 'session') you can install okular-kde4 and it has support for this format. I'm not a KDE guy myself, but it is getting more and more attractive

Have you tried to install THIS free XPS viewer for Windows and run it through WINE yet?

-ps. I swear the school is just out to pi$$ you off about this. I would call them back and tell them to send me a copy before having to purchase a special M$ product to view it.

[DaddyX3]

It appears that if you are running KDE4 (1.9 in a different 'session') you can install okular-kde4 and it has support for this format. I'm not a KDE guy myself, but it is getting more and more attractive

Ok DaddyX3, you beet me to it by a few minutes. I installed Office 2007 on my windows machine and created a xps file format. I then installed okular-kde4 through synaptic package manager. And I am on the gnome side and it works. This is the best solution I can come up with.

Great minds think alike DaddyX3.

WOW, thats great! I was thinking that it would work with gnome but wasn't positive and wouldn't lead someone astray, so thanks for testing it all out! That, I guess is an definite solution. Way to go Strider

[satelight7430]

why yes,yes and YES!!!
we are the life blood of the software companys banks!!
and the schooling just falls into the catagory of,if we say you need it you'll buy it!!
I have one child in ball state,ind that has to do all her resaerch on windblows so her professers can follow
what shes doing and now this $#!% from another child in another state whom is trying to get her foot ahead(trying) is getting stuck also! it infurates me that to take certain classes she need to use certain softwares
and cant use freeware.its like the schools are trying to market software or force someone to be use only 1 prodduct. This is the holy grail!!
$#!%, in the measly 10 to 20 yrs i've used a computer that things have drasticly changed. and probally
will continue to.anyway just finished watching the debeates(still scratching my head) and will do some reading on the posts and hopefully come up with an answer.thanks for your quick responces and letting me know that i'm not the only one thats seen this and dont want to just follow the crowd!!
thanks and cheers.
and keep the posts comming,it help ease my soul.

[SaddleTramp]

This issue raised hell on my college campus several months ago what with the .xps format and the (non-backwards compatible) .docx formats. Personally, I can't help but think that MS is over-playing their hand trying to go head-to-head with Adobe's .pdf format. At least I hope so.

Dear GAWD how I hope so.

While .xps/.docx/etc...is not back-compatible, it's up to the creator of the document as to what format it's to be saved in..there are options to save to formats compatible to older versions, which are compatible to opening up in OOo...

[deate]

There are also .docx converters out there, online, although I haven't used them. I'm glad you've got a starting point Sorry I missed that "xps" format line up there, I just haven't seen it. My last MS product,besides winXP, was MS Word 2000 Thank goodness I don't live in a "world" where they are necessary

[DaddyX3]

This issue raised hell on my college campus several months ago what with the .xps format and the (non-backwards compatible) .docx formats. Personally, I can't help but think that MS is over-playing their hand trying to go head-to-head with Adobe's .pdf format. At least I hope so.

Dear GAWD how I hope so.

While .xps/.docx/etc...is not back-compatible, it's up to the creator of the document as to what format it's to be saved in..there are options to save to formats compatible to older versions, which are compatible to opening up in OOo...

I say, make them spend the money on a stamp and print/ mail them to ya. I'm sure they can afford a stamp.

[pch.shot]

All Canadian Government forms are in pdf format so I would not get too worried about Microsoft taking over.
The cost for giant corporations like governments(much wealthier than Microsoft ever will be) of countries to switch is much too prohibitive.The voters would not allow it!! Obviously, Windows are starting to worry that they are starting to faulter a bit. They are just trying to protect what they think is their domain. It is a common human reaction to a potential threat.