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“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

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Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#11

Post by yuhong »

mikeash wrote: post #8
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #4

This is NOT true of all proprietary software. It's just that with apple either you keep upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time or you will have problems. Apple has its pros and cons, and one of those is that you have to keep upgrading regularly. Most proprietary software will offer upgrade paths from older versions.

Additionally, there's nothing inherent about open source that avoids this sort of problem. An open source project could decide on exactly the same sort of upgrade path, where they support current-minus-one versions and that's it. In theory, open source is better because the old code is still out there and you can get it up and running to upgrade your data. In practice, it can be pretty tough to get open source code t…

I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format for example.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#12

Post by stefanu »

Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

You are right, I can get all the necessary hardware for that. That is not a problem, problem is that I can't have that when I need it. Imagine you go to a meetup and would like to show some older presentations and you are not aware of the issue. Well, bad luck - nothing to show, no quick fix by downloading a conversion tool or older version of the software.

I'm not saying that it is permanent problem, there is solution for it for sure. It is just unnecessarily cumbersome and mostly unexpected: I can imagine dropping support for files from 1995 not for files from 2008.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#13

Post by FollowSteph3 »

stefanu wrote: post #9
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #4

This is NOT true of all proprietary software. It's just that with apple either you keep upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time or you will have problems. Apple has its pros and cons, and one of those is that you have to keep upgrading regularly. Most proprietary software will offer upgrade paths from older versions.

You are right, it is not true of all proprietary software. There is no problem with software upgrades, not even with frequent software upgrades. Problem is when the software requires regular document upgrades . This requirement can not be met in real life, if you produce few documents a month.

What I'm saying is most proprietary software does offer document upgrades. You can open very old versions of Word, Excel, etc. My company supports opening backed up files up to about 8-9 years ago. The only reason we don't go further is that older versions don't work on modern OS'es and hence no one uses them. But even then it's still possible to upgrade if you really wanted to.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#14

Post by jobu »

Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

I would be very surprised if Keynote '09' would even run in Mavericks. When I upgraded to Lion a couple years back I couldn't use any of the iWork suite that came with the computer. Fortunately I had only made a couple throwaway presentations and documents at that point, but it taught me a lesson about Apple's approach to planned obsolescence.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#15

Post by FollowSteph3 »

stefanu wrote: post #12
Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

You are right, I can get all the necessary hardware for that. That is not a problem, problem is that I can't have that when I need it. Imagine you go to a meetup and would like to show some older presentations and you are not aware of the issue. Well, bad luck - nothing to show, no quick fix by downloading a conversion tool or older version of the software. I'm not saying that it is permanent problem, there is soluti…

I think that's the key most people are forgetting here. You're talkng maybe 5 years ago, even more recent. When you go back 10+ years it's not unreasonable to expect some drop in support. But 2 versions is way way too quick!!

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#16

Post by clarry »

otterley wrote: post #10

For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.

I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec. How about plain uncompressed text and netp[bgp]m for images?

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#18

Post by kalleboo »

yuhong wrote: post #3

I think even MS is better than this at supporting old Office binary formats. Only PowerPoint has completely removed the support for pre-97 formats. With Word/Excel you can generally unblock support for older formats even if by default they will not open.

Apple is also better at supporting old MS formats. I found some old recipes I wrote in Word 6.0.1 in 1998, which opened fine in OS X Mavericks's TextEdit.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#19

Post by fredoralive »

jobu wrote: post #14
Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

I would be very surprised if Keynote '09' would even run in Mavericks. When I upgraded to Lion a couple years back I couldn't use any of the iWork suite that came with the computer. Fortunately I had only made a couple throwaway presentations and documents at that point, but it taught me a lesson about Apple's approach to planned obsolescence.

iWork '09 works on Mavericks.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#20

Post by stephencanon »

otterley wrote: post #10

For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.

Text formats should be readable forever. PDF, while generally excellent in this regard, has already broken backwards-comparability on several occasions (or rather: Acrobat has, which is not formally the same as the format doing so, but in practice there isn’t a whole lot of difference; you might as well just read the raw xml in an “unopenable” keynote document).

Adobe’s marketing will tell you otherwise, of course. I used to share an office at Berkeley with Paulo Ney de Souza, who had a wonderful collection of “legacy” pdf files that could no longer be opened in Acrobat that he would trot out for the Adobe sales people when they came by (he was helping to get MSP off the ground at that point).

PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain text copy.

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