Poor choice of font and file format in update docs

[idata]

I know that the important thing is that all of our drives end up working. So, this posting may see trivial to some of you.

First, congrats to the engineering group for this patch. No doubt you've had a long month. Thanks for all your hard work on this.

I was just looking at the Release Notes 2.1 document from the update released today. On the whole, it looks well written and appropriate. But I have these questions for Intel:

1. Why are the release notes in Word 2007 format, one of the least adopted document formats and only available in Windows? If for some reason you're forced to use MS Office format, then Word 2003 would have been much more appropriate. However, best would be Adobe Acrobat in that it's OS-agnostic and free.
2. Who in their right mind publishes a technical document with such an illegible font?? (See attached photo.) Maybe someone thought they were being cute or a good little marketer by using "Neo Sans Intel." Here's a hint to Intel: None of us wants to struggle to read a cursive font like the one you used. Those of us reading these documents are technical and frown on your cluttering things up with noisy, pretty fonts that are tough to read. As your repeated SSD product failures and communications failures have shown, you have a long way to go to convince us that the SSD group knows what it's doing. Don't make it worse...

As I said, this all may seem pretty trivial. But what worries me is that it implies that either the engineering group has been highjacked by some know-nothing, marketing MBA type. Or that this product is being run by an engineer in the trenches who doesn't know any better and thought it would be "cool" to use a font that includes the word "Intel" in its name. Either way, it would explain why the trust we all placed in Intel in purchasing their product (at a premium price no less...) has been betrayed by events of the last month.

Until Intel gets it's act together, next time I'll probably buy "Brand X's" product so that I get the quality product and the respect that Intel seemed unable to deliver on this product.

Here's a sample of the offending font (which would be better used on wedding invitations than technical documents...)

Message title was edited (and toned down!) by original poster.

[idata]

It's a browser issue, I get a .zip file in Win7 Internet Explorer.

Replacing %20 with spaces didn't work either, I get the same zip file.

I tried Chrome and downloaded the .DOCX file.

Thanks for your help Ziggy.

[idata]

Er, OK, so it's an MS format file that can only be downloaded in a non-MS browser! An interesting approach.

Well at least I know how to get it now - thanks all for the info.

S

[idata]

The problems you're having with the Microsoft Word 2007 files is a good example of why Intel was ill-advised to use this file format for distributing technical information.

.docx files are actually zip files and can be opened as such by any zip program. Inside, you'll find a collection of .xml files, which is what you are reporting. (However those files are tough to read too!)

If you have Microsoft Word 2003, you can download their "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats" from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa...

Once installed, you should be able to open the file in Word 2003, although rather than just clicking the file's link on the Intel site, you may have to right-click and save it to your desktop and then manually open it using Word's File, Open menu...

I've also changed the name of this thread to be a bit less alarmist!

[idata]

Great info, I renamed the .zip file to .docx and it worked

[idata]

tfield98, I've been using Office 2007 or over a year and didn't realise until now that docx was actually a zip. Thanks for the info!