[gobolinux-users] open office versus OO.o

[Sean Russell]

On Tuesday 18 July 2006 07:59, MJ Ray wrote:
> "Sean E. Russell" <gobo at ser1.net> wrote:
> > And yet OpenOffice does it, really well.  Not only for Word, but
> > for Excel and PowerPoint, and in business these latter two are
> > almost more important than the first.
...
> > Not well enough for business.
>
> Well enough for my business and I think most PowerPoint users should

I'm not going to debate the goodness of PowerPoint or Excel.  At the 
moment, they're de-facto business standards, and I don't set policy at 
my own company, much less the industry.

> on. This has the added benefits that any programs they put in their
> documents (intentionally or not) don't hurt me and I'm not hindered
> by anyone's love of MS Comic Sans.

Any non-trivial spreadsheet *is* a program.

> I think OpenOffice should be included on the CD, but it will have
> little effect on business acceptance.  I don't think writing

You're right.  Business won't accept it just because OO is on the CD.  
By not including it, you hurt people who are trying to use Gobo in a 
business where Microsoft is the standard.  Your rhetoric about the evil 
Microsoft standards that only idiots and goat rapists would use is not 
going to change the policy of the company I work for, and it isn't 
going to remove the need for me, or a bunch of other people, to be able 
to load and save Microsoft formatted documents.

I wish everybody would use open standards, and I think ODF is the best 
thing to come along in a long, long time.  However, I don't care enough 
about it to go on a crusade, and I'm happy that OO -- with all of its 
faults -- understands MS data formats well enough that it means that I 
can run Linux on my desktop.

--- SER