Roy,

News from more than 4 years ago:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2008/may08/05-21expandedformatspr.aspx

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 
different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel 
and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service 
Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to 
include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document 
Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

So, ODF is a well designed and flexible standard to store information in 
a future-proof and portable way. It is not as random as some may think, 
and there is not a single "real" office product. Microsoft's involvement 
with ODF is not just to make ODF better, or to be nice. Rather, it is a 
sound business decision, because OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, 
LibreOffice, Calligra, Google Docs and Zoho Office all use ODF. 
Microsoft supports ODF only to keep current customers that see the 
benefits of ODF, it is not the MS default, and it might be difficult to 
enable in MS Office, and MS will not be advertising it.

What ODF benefits; The Open Document format is a safer, smaller, more 
stable, more secure format. Think about it, with the MS format you're 
putting your intellectual property in a proprietary format that you 
don't own, nor have any control of, where the owner of this format can 
(and does) change it whenever and however they want, usually for 
marketing reasons. One would think that we would have learned a lesson 
when HP pulled the 3000 out from under our feet, I did. The Open 
Document Format will allow us to retain the intellectual property in the 
documents we create by using open standards. Unlike the ownership of 
file formats by proprietary software companies - our documents and the 
format they are stored in should belong to us. I've learned from the 
past that forced migrations and updates to a vendor specific file 
formats make us even more dependent on the same vendor, this method of 
marketing can disrupt the entire market - inflating prices, hampering 
innovation and reducing security. File formats should not be part of the 
marketing approach, they should just do their job. Which is why we want 
ODF, why we need ODF, because you should not need to be concerned about 
the file format!

Why would you even consider storing your valuable information in a 
proprietary file format?

So, there is one rouge software vendor,  not just one "real" office 
product. The cause of the compatibility problem is %100 Microsoft, 
motivated by the fact that this problem does discourage the use of 
Non-Microsoft software. Microsoft can do this because they do have the 
market cornered, and in my opinion this is not good for the economy of 
the software industry, nor is it good for the software consumers.

What are the rules of Document compatibility? Compatibility issues with 
documents created by Open Document Software, that can't be opened using 
MS Office versions that are less than 2007 Service Pack 2, can be fixed 
by saving the document in the correct MS Office version, a simple SaveAs 
in LibreOffice.

If you are using Office 2007 Service Pack 2 or greater, then you 
shouldn't have any compatibility problems if you always use ODF, but ODF 
is not the Microsoft default.
If you do not use ODF you will have edge case compatibility issues.

--
Mike.


On 09/01/2012 05:46 PM, Roy Brown wrote:
> In message <[log in to unmask]>, Michael Anderson 
> <[log in to unmask]> writing at 14:56:42 in his/her local time 
> opines:-
>
>> I'd have to say, get rid of the Windows Problem entirely! I don't see 
>> any reason to continue with Windows.
>> There are so many distributions of GUN+Linux, there is bound to be 
>> one for your specific needs.
>> For full featured servers I recommend ClearOS (RedHat with a better 
>> distribution Model).
>> For general Desktop/Laptop I still recommend Ubuntu.
>
> <snip>
>
> Problem with your automobile? Throw it away and get a pogo stick.....
>
> I can't answer for Joseph, but I like a computer where to backspace, 
> you press backspace, and don't have to remember to use CTRL+backspace 
> to do it.
>
> And don't get me started on vi, where the up/down/left/right keys 
> aren't even an intuitive set of four from the keyboard.
>
> Or make, where lines must be indented with a tab in order to mean what 
> they look like they mean, a tab that isn't visible to vi.
>
> Or even the commands that run makefiles, and things like it, which on 
> DOS (let alone Windows) would merit a .bat file of their own, just to 
> ensure you had all the options correct from invocation to invocation
>
> but on Linux, require a shell script, which might be the bash shell, 
> or the korn shell. or some other shell perhaps.
>
> And assuming you can negotiate this lot, you find you have about a 
> gazillion powerful tools for developers - for which read finding 
> files, and finding things in files, and altering files, and moving 
> files, and changing the permissions of files so you don't have to use 
> sudo, which you can't do anyway because it purposely won't inherit all 
> the useful PATHs, etc., from your environment - and so on, and little 
> or nothing for getting any useful application work done.
>
> I mean, sure you can open Office files with OpenOffice, or 
> LibreOffice, or 
> ThisWeeksSplinterGroupVersionBecauseWeDidntLikeWhereTheOtherGuysWereGoing
> WithItOffice, and they might quite look like Microsoft intended, sort 
> of, partially, sometimes, maybe, if you're lucky.
>
> But just try updating them in those products and sending the results 
> to a user of the real Office. This is not always a very successful 
> enterprise..... :-(
>
> You might well call it PEBKAC that GUIs have spoiled me to the point 
> where I can only just about type 10 characters without going wrong 
> somewhere.
>
> But I couldn't survive working on a Linux server without a powerful 
> Windows text editor open in which I can keep my snippets of commands, 
> to cut and paste them into a Windows-hosted Reflection session 
> connected to that server.
>
> So I certainly wouldn't countenance giving up my Windows installation
> for some Linux distress - not even if you held a GNU to my head :-)

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