John R Pierce wrote:
> m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> Yep, as well as .xlsx
>>
>> But, I mean, you know all the *pressing* and Important reasons that M$ had
>> to change the file format....
>>
>>
>
> FWIW, the new formats are XML based, albeit compressed. in most
> theories, this is a good idea for portability.
>
> the old file formats were proprietary, complex and full of ugliness from
> 20 years of extensions and variations (.DOC was used by MS Word for
> MSDOS circa 1985). Yes, I know, MS did their own XML 'open' document
> format, not the one everyone else is using, but at least being XML, its
> readily decodable.
>
Sorry but M$ supposedly "open" format isn't. If M$ would have wanted to
be really Open, it would have chosen ODF or develop OOXML in an open
manner... I have many clients that lived the Office nightmare where the
Office versions are not able to perfectly render files between them,
where the "compatibility plugins" don't translate 100%, etc. All that
to force clients to buy new version of Office, the "Admiral Ship" of M$.
This is the "spread like a virus and bug the others" method... New PCs
of my clients were sold with Office 2007 while the older PCs had 2003.
Technical documents were loosing formatting, no matter what we tried.
We called M$ and we were told to call Dell because Office was OEM. We
call Dell and they said to call M$... Finally, Dell was forced to do
something but they said they would do something they're not supposed:
Sell us Office 2007 OEM for the older PCs... But still, it doesn't cure
the problem with our 2500 technical spec sheets that were done with
Office 2007...
I pushed a lot for my clients to adopt Open Office but they told me it
isn't "standard" and that they would't be able to work with other
companies that, in majority, were using "standard" M$ Office!!! So here
we have FUD, misundertanding of the word "standard" and users that freak
out because they don't know Open Office... M$ and users at their best...
See:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/odf_ooxml_technical_white_paper
(there is a link for the PDF version on top of this article:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf)
GB
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