[Ti] OpenOffice on Mac

[Mikael Byström]

Chris Olson said:

>There's nothing wrong with Microsoft Office.  
Proprietary formats are always wrong, if you ask me.

>It's an excellent and well-supported office suite.  
I think it's too cumbersome to be called "excellent". My main problem is
that it tries to be a DTP program and many people use it as such, and it
fails miserably. It should focus on *words* and writing IMHO. And
powerful as Word may be, it seem not be suited to *people* as well as I'd
expect from such a big corporation. But it's improving all the time of course.
What's worse is that many tend to get Word not because they find it can
achieve their goals best, but because that's all they know. I feel it's
important to educate in choosing the proper software for the right
reasons and also to present the alternatives.

>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.

Well, I'm with open standards.

>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.

I will follow this with some interest. Thanks for the heads-up.