Stupid Software Limitations: Business Plan Pro
Posted January 25th, 2005 @ 11:45am by Erik J. Barzeski
Here's an email I sent to the makers of Business Plan Pro:
I have Business Plan Pro on a relatively inexpensive PC running Windows XP Home. I have a Mac with the latest version of Office. The Mac is my primary machine.
I would like to export from Business Plan Pro to Microsoft Word format, yet each time I attempt to do this I'm told that I cannot because I do not have Word installed on the PC.
I have it on the Mac, and it's quite easy to transfer a file from one computer to the other.
Why then does your product fail to let me export my business plan to Word format? It's ridiculous to require Word in order to export to Word and quite possible that a customer may own Word and simply have it installed on another computer.
I appreciate that the product "interfaces" with Word, but I'd just like to create something that can be edited elsewhere. Is RTF really an option? I don't think so… Still a nice big hole in the Mac software market.
Donate Life
Posted 25 Jan 2005 at 3:05pm #
As you noted, it interfaces with Word .dlls so that the application doesn't have to do any work. Windows doesn't have any built-in rtf functionality (besides the Word .dlls), so that's not really an option. This company would have to write their own output code which they're not likely to do, since everyone else using their software has Word installed. They could probably output to plain text but that would look pretty bad and it's a workaround to accomodate probably less than 1% of their users.
The plus side to this is that Word for Windows is not terribly expensive. You can probably find an older version that will work fine for really cheap. Windows software can also be obtained less legally with a few simple searches if you want to go that route.