There are two recommended file formats for word processor files in the School at present: WordPerfect 5.1 and Word for Windows, version 6. Word for Windows 2.0 is still quite widely used but is not officially supported. Word for Windows 6 can read and write version 2.0 (and earlier) formats and can read and write WordPerfect 5.1 files. The Mac and Windows versions of Word 6 are extremely similar (they share the same manual) and handle each other's file formats painlessly. So the only problem that arises is that users of WordPerfect 5.1 are dependent on their colleagues using Word for translations to their format. This works for simple documents. This page would probably transfer reasonably between Word (in which it was written) and WordPerfect, courtesy of Word's translating. However, documents with various fonts, tables, cross-references, annotations and footnotes are a different story: do not expect these to transfer painlessly. If possible, use Word for all complicated documents.
Embedded graphics are an even bigger headache: WordPerfect has its own graphics format. I have no experience of using Word's conversion facilities to handle this and wouldn't predict much success. See the document on "Graphics formats and conversion" for more information on recommended graphics formats.
Staff may have deep seated allegiances to other packages, people working with equations often use a package called TeX for example. It also happens that people collaborate with others who use different packages. To handle the relatively infrequent problems that will arise when people need to convert between other packages and either WordPerfect or Word, the Computer Unit will be providing a wordprocessor file format conversion package. Whether this can be mounted on the network or will only be available for individual use on a single machine in the Unit is not clear at present. Problems transferring complicated documents between WordPerfect and Word may be remedied by such a package but this will vary with the exact nature of the problem: the only advice possible is to give the conversion package a try.
The WorldWideWeb enables all computers on the Internet to look at documents formatted in "HTML" format as if they were mounted locally, though they may be in Australia. It also enables files to include "hot" links to other files. You may be reading this information on paper or you may be reading it on the WWW. It is I.P.C. policy that all official School documents be published on the School's WWW server. This form of publication should come to replace a very large percentage of documentation saving many trees, many thousands of pounds and enabling sensible links between documents (you want to follow through the a Departmental committees repeated returns to a single topic: you just start on the most recent set of minutes and click on the hot link from that topic to the previous set, from there to the next ...) Microsoft supply a free addition to Word 6 for Windows which carries out conversion to and from HTML format easily and makes the creation of hot links and other potentialities of the HTML format very easy to manage. Contact Mark Preston a.k.a. WebMaster (M.Preston@sghms.ac.uk) in the Computer Unit for more information on HTML and the WWW.