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Office Suites
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competitive situation is that LibreOffice/Apache OpenOffice as well as
Microsoft Office 2007 and above are XML-based, which points toward a future
when files from all these suites and applications will indeed be truly
exchangeable and conversion will no longer even be an issue.
Still, I believe it’s more important to consider which line of Microsoft Office
should be used and how often you should upgrade than which of the office
suites a translator should use.
Release Versions of Microsoft Office
To find out which release version of Microsoft Office you should use, first look
at all the other programs you use that in some way interact with programs of
Office, most notably PowerPoint and Word. Many of the translation
environment programs use Word plug-ins that often are not updated to the
latest release of Word until months after Microsoft has published it, while
other computer-assisted translation tools require a minimum version. Other
programs that use Word plug-ins include Adobe Acrobat, virus check
programs, and voice recognition programs.
If you are sure that you will not have any conflict with any other program, you
can start to look into upgrading. In general, the best advice for upgrading
Microsoft Office may be to wait until you buy a new computer (assuming that
your new computer comes pre-installed with Office). The changes between
the different versions often make very little difference in our work as
translators, so it may be hard to justify the fairly significant expense.
However, there are some exceptions of Office upgrades that make a
significant difference.
XML—eXtensible Markup Language—was developed by the World Wide Web
Consortium as an alternative to HTML (see page 114)—which was not
sophisticated enough for the creation of interactive content—and SGML—which
proved to be too complex for web applications. The most important aspect of
XML may be that it allows for the definition, transmission, validation, and
interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.
