Currently viewing the tag: "MS Office"
GIVEN the cost of buying a licensed copy of MS Office and the dangers of using pirated software, it’s no surprise that many companies are opting to use OpenOffice. Published free and open source, OpenOffice (Version 3.0 is the latest) can be downloaded and used with no legal liability or guilt—and it does most of what MS Office does. As a bonus, it runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, so your main productivity tool won’t be locking you in to one operating system.
I never took to MS Office 2007.
Having used earlier versions of MS Word for years, I was frustrated when I couldn’t easily find the menus or commands where they used to be on its newfangled ribbon interface. I also disliked that its applications wrote by default to a file format that was unreadable by earlier versions of MS Office.
So this week, when I heard that a new version of my favorite free MS Office replacement, OpenOffice, would be released, I greeted the news with some reservations.
MICROSOFT is pulling out all the stops ahead of a crucial meeting in Geneva to determine if the default file format in its MS Office 2007 suite becomes an international standard.
It is against the backdrop of this week’s International Organization for Standardization (ISO) meeting on the OOXML format that we can better appreciate Microsoft’s announcement last Thursday that it would be more open about sharing information on its products and technology.
A BATTLE is raging over the future of office productivity software, with most of the fighting going on outside the view of ordinary consumers. But obscure as it may seem, the debate over international document standards could determine if governments and companies alike will be able to choose alternatives to MS Office and still be confident that they can send and receive files that anyone else can read.
The battleground is the International Organization for Standardization or ISO, where Microsoft is trying to get its proprietary OOXML file format certified. For reasons that will become apparent, the company refuses to support the Open Document Format or ODF, which is already ISO-certified.
Linux version of Symphony
YOUR competitors keep giving their software away—what’s a poor monopoly to do?
The thought—if not those exact words—must have crossed the minds of Microsoft executives when IBM announced this month that it would join the open source community that develops and distributes a free alternative to the MS Office suite.
