[X4U] MS Office 2008 delayed

[Zane H. Healy]

At 8:40 PM -0700 8/5/07, Randy B. Singer wrote:
>You are absolutely right about this.  This is a problem.  And it 
>came to a head a number of months ago with a number of companies 
>banding together behind a new open document format to break 
>Microsoft's strangle-hold on the business word processor market.  I 
>don't think that new format will ever catch on, but its formation 
>forced Microsoft to make its own new XML-based format an open format 
>also.

With Massachusetts having caved, ODF (the Open Document Format) has 
been declared dead by one of the Linux publications, I fear they are 
correct.  While Microsoft has submitted their new file format to I 
believe the ISO standards committee, it like their HTML products 
contain non-standard extensions to XML.

>Just about every word processor on the market can handle the ".doc" 
>format, even OS X's TextEdit.  But as you have found, some do a much 
>better job than others.  I'm told, but can't confirm through 
>personal experience, that icWord
>http://www.panergy-software.com/products/lp/we/gn_op.html
>does an excellent job.  There is a free trial available, and the 
>program is only $30, with a money-back guarantee.

Interesting, this appears to be a document reader/converter rather 
than a Word Processor.

Personally for simple extracting of text from a word document, I like 
Antiword.  I have it installed for when I'm logged in remotely and 
need to view a Word docuement in an SSH terminal session.  It might 
not be perfect, but it serves the purpose I need.  At that point I 
really don't care about formating or anything.

	Zane


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