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Author
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Topic: Microsoft to give Office access to rivals
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radiorahim
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2777
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posted 22 November 2005 06:24 PM
quote:
Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so.
Financial Times article Wow how the mighty have fallen! I guess Microsoft is feeling the heat from governments in the EU and in places like the state of Massachusetts who've been moving toward the "open document format" for the exchange of e-documents...a standard that Microsoft has refused to support. With Microsoft finally opening up their document formats, on the one hand it helps them maintain their government business...and on the other hand it opens up some possibilities for improved interoperability between commercial office software like Corel and Star Office...and open source software like Open Office. Up to this point Microsoft's competitors have had to "reverse engineer" Microsoft's file formats often with mixed results. Open Office is pretty compatible with MS Word...but not quite so compatible with Excel and Powerpoint. Hopefully this will change.
From: a Micro$oft-free computer | Registered: Jun 2002
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Raos
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5702
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posted 22 November 2005 06:55 PM
Yah, I need to upgrade that, but it doesn't seem to have made it into the Ubuntu repositories yet. Well, at least not the 5.04 repositories, yet. I'm not risking upgrading to breezy until the semesters over, and I don't have to worry about losing precious hours of study time straightening anything out.Oh, and IIRC, since I was thinking about it, the windows version of OO.o was able to open to open and save in the .wk4 format, but the linux version couldn't. So for windows users of OO.o, there's no end to the format compatibility.
From: Sweet home Alaberta | Registered: May 2004
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radiorahim
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2777
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posted 22 November 2005 09:58 PM
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Yah, I need to upgrade that, but it doesn't seem to have made it into the Ubuntu repositories yet. Well, at least not the 5.04 repositories, yet. I'm not risking upgrading to breezy until the semesters over, and I don't have to worry about losing precious hours of study time straightening anything out.
By then "Dapper Drake" (Version 6) will be out  The first pre-release is already out for testing. I'm running Suse 9.3 on one of my machines and they included the beta of OO.o Version 2.0 in the distro and now have the "official" 2.0 version of OO.o in the Suse repositories. BTW here's a link to a somewhat more "technical" article dealing with Microsoft and opening up formats. consortiuminfo.org article [ 22 November 2005: Message edited by: radiorahim ]
From: a Micro$oft-free computer | Registered: Jun 2002
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