[Ti] OpenOffice on Mac

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 21, 2005, at 4:52 PM, Mikael Byström wrote:

> With which I meant replacement applications for the ubiquitous  
> Microsoft Office Suite. I just want to help as many organisations  
> to get rid of it as possible.

There's nothing wrong with Microsoft Office.  It's an excellent and  
well-supported office suite.  However (currently) OpenOffice is the  
only application on Mac OS X able to read/write ODF (Open Document  
Format).  This may become important in the future as governments such  
as the State of Massachusetts have announced intentions of adopting  
ODF as their standard document format.  That initiative may succeed  
if open standards win.  It may not if Microsoft and some politicians  
win.

Then today I notice Microsoft has said that next Tuesday they'll  
announce the opening of Office formats to competitors such as Apple  
(Pages) and OpenOffice (Sun/FOSS).  I suspect this move is due to  
pressure from the open source community, the EU, and initiatives such  
as that in Massachusetts.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.   
Otherwise Microsoft I'm sure would retain a stranglehold on Office  
file format specifications.

> But this subject is probably better suited for software oriented  
> lists, so I'll stop here.

Yeah well, office suite software runs on PowerBooks just as much as  
anti-virus software does.
-- 
Chris

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