Hey guys, do we have Microsoft Office on any of the common computers at the Space? I use Open Office at home, but I’m trying to rebuild my resume, and when you email anything made with this program, the formatting gets screwed up even saved as a .docx file.
Just a thought … can you save it as a pdf to avoid unwanted re-formatting?
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Export to PDF? That’s a best practice, any way, i.e. sending doc/docx files leave them in an editable state. (technically, you can edit PDFs as well, but it is a little trickier.)
(edit: what Bert said…)
IMO, maybe convert it to PDF before handing it off so you don’t have to worry about what versions of Office everyone is running (unless of course they ask for it in Word).
edit: apparently I type slow on mobile this early in the morning 
Converting to a PDF did occur to me recently and I intend to start doing that, but the other issue is that Writer has garbage resume templates and I kind of just hate dealing with it period.
Mr. Blatz, it’s a “Save As” function in Word.
I can’t speak to the specifics of the situation(s) you’re dealing with, but some depressing percentage of resumes are never read as formatted and are instead chunked into databases as plaintext for keyword mining and/or magicked into the company’s standard format by said DB or HR backoffice people.
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Yes, but what is it Open Office? (ahhh…the Quibbler strikes again!)
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Nice ideas as workarounds, but does anyone know the answer?
I have never seen Microsoft Office on any Space computers, but maybe someone on @Team_Infrastructure can give a definitive answer.
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I also have never seen any Office products on the DMS computers. And I don’t think Microsoft offers a licensing option that will be cost effective for us with their latest Office 365 products. The “thick” versions (Office 2019, for example) could be purchased as a perpetual license, but no upgrade rights. This might be less costly, but will be limited to individual PCs (i.e. not the jump server, because that opens us up to multiple simultaneous users, which would violate the individual license.)
But yes, would be nice to hear if @Team_Infrastructure might have a better answer, and perhaps see if DMS might qualify as an “educational institution” for Microsoft’s educational pricing (Office Online would be FREE), etc.
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Yeah, I recently learned that too. 
Luckily most of the jobs I’m trying to apply for are small niche industry employers that I’m contacting directly by email with resume attached, so it needs to look nice.
I think we could do a few full 365 licenses and tie them to the design computers or similar. We would want to turn off cloud sync though to prevent mixing of documents, but I don’t think it violates the license since only one user can operate on it at a time
With O365, you get the web access. As long as the credentials for the account are known, the web access can be used simultaneously by many users. Hence my concern about possible license violations. I really can’t speak definitively on this at the moment, though. I admit that I tend to proceed with a very large dose of caution in these areas, so I may be too strong in my assessment of the risk.
last I checked it caps the number of machine installs. If it’s installed machine wide I don’t think it requires a relogin on the same machine, but I haven’t tested roaming profile effects on it in a while.
We could additionally make an “office” virtual appliance on those machines, but that’s kind of hacky.
-Jim
I think for “per machine” licenses, we are looking at the Office 2019 product and not Office 365, which is the per-user subscription model. And yes, I would generally agree that hacky solutions for these kinds of issues only create gray areas with the licenses and the software vendors tend to win when they sue creative customers for over these gray areas.
Microsoft offers some quite generous donations (I think up to 50 copies of Office 2019) through Techsoup.
Formatting can still get jacked up in a PDF if the end user opens it in a browser instead of Acrobat Reader. Many browsers can be as infuriating as some MS Office features…
I’ve never tried Google Docs for anything complicated- is it of any use for a Resume?
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Yes, and more just simple docs like Resumes. I’ve seen people write entire books, business reports, and even research papers in it. It can even to stuff that LaTeX is typically used with.
Plus collaborative work is a breeze and one can publish to the web just by clicking share.
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