F
Frobnitz
I administer a small mixed network of computers for an academic department,
and the users are allocated a Mac or PC according to their preference.
One of the academic staff is submitting a presentation to a conference,
where the presentation will be shown via Office XP on Windows XP, but she is
creating the presentation using Office X on a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS
10.1.3. All versions of the operating systems and application software are
fully patched up to the current date. The installation of Office X is by
the default "drag folder to hard driver for full install", the install for
Windows is done by using a GPO with a transform that installs most options
(bar the office assistant), all remaining options (except the office
assistant) are flagged for install on first use. If an option doesn't have
a first use option, it is installed by default (except the office
assistant).
In this presentation she has created a few small charts using the Graph
function in Powerpoint X. Two of the charts are bar charts, and two are
line charts.
Now, when the file is transferred to the Windows machine the
incompatibilities arise. First, the gridlines that were selected under
Office X are not visible, and if you open the chart for editing, only the
bar chart can be opened - the line charts give the error "The server
application, source file, or item can't be found, or returned an unknown
error. You may need to reinstall the server application". However, if the
file, using Office X on a Mac is modified, with the same data, to be a bar
chart, and then opened under Office 2k3, the charts are fully editable, and
can be converted to line charts. Still no gridlines though.
Has anyone got any ideas as to what may be causing these anomalies?
Eddie Dubourg
Computing Officer
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
University of Edinburgh
and the users are allocated a Mac or PC according to their preference.
One of the academic staff is submitting a presentation to a conference,
where the presentation will be shown via Office XP on Windows XP, but she is
creating the presentation using Office X on a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS
10.1.3. All versions of the operating systems and application software are
fully patched up to the current date. The installation of Office X is by
the default "drag folder to hard driver for full install", the install for
Windows is done by using a GPO with a transform that installs most options
(bar the office assistant), all remaining options (except the office
assistant) are flagged for install on first use. If an option doesn't have
a first use option, it is installed by default (except the office
assistant).
In this presentation she has created a few small charts using the Graph
function in Powerpoint X. Two of the charts are bar charts, and two are
line charts.
Now, when the file is transferred to the Windows machine the
incompatibilities arise. First, the gridlines that were selected under
Office X are not visible, and if you open the chart for editing, only the
bar chart can be opened - the line charts give the error "The server
application, source file, or item can't be found, or returned an unknown
error. You may need to reinstall the server application". However, if the
file, using Office X on a Mac is modified, with the same data, to be a bar
chart, and then opened under Office 2k3, the charts are fully editable, and
can be converted to line charts. Still no gridlines though.
Has anyone got any ideas as to what may be causing these anomalies?
Eddie Dubourg
Computing Officer
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
University of Edinburgh