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I was talking about when you send a Open Document to a person with MS word. It doesn't read them.

And saving it as a .doc format again defeats the purpose of opendocument. Its important to only have things in one format.

Furthermore, MS word having issues with older versions of .Doc is a urban legend spread by anti-ms people. Even if true, there would be no way that OO.o would be able to handle them better. Also OO.o .doc handling is just a hack, no one is going to use it for something important.

Also, far as sending a .doc file to someone, that would be something you would have to do everytime unless you know they have OO.o . Sending 2 copies of a file gets even more silly.

I also find it funny that one person in the article doubts MS claim about PDF support request. Anyone who thinks demand for PDF in Office wouldn't be huge, but thinks people are going to go for OpenDocument in a big way is an idiot. "No way people would demand support for one of the most common document file formats in the world, but for sure they will demand one of the least common"

I'm also curious how the format stacks up. I see mention of it supporting change tracking, i'd like to know if it does to the same level you can in MS word. Can multiple people make changes with who did them shown and others accept and decline these changes. That is a hugely used part of MS word in a office environment.

{I was talking about when you send a Open Document to a person with MS word. It doesn't read them.}

OK, so you re-open the document in OpenOffice, then save a new copy as a Word format document, and send them the copy.

{And saving it as a .doc format again defeats the purpose of opendocument. Its important to only have things in one format.}

Agreed that it is important to have a common forma, disagree that it defeats any purpose. You keep all your own documents in OpenDocument (so that you will always be able to read them) and you just send copies in Word to backwater correspondants that haven't yet caught up with the new document standards.

{Sending 2 copies of a file gets even more silly.}

Not nearly as silly as not being able to read your own data in a few years time when Microsoft "forces" you to upgrade.

{but thinks people are going to go for OpenDocument in a big way is an idiot.}

What are you on about? All of Europe is looking at going for OpenDocument.

{i'd like to know if it does to the same level you can in MS word.}

I'd hope it does a hell of a lot better job than Word does. Change tracking in Word breaks largish documents badly.

{Can multiple people make changes with who did them shown and others accept and decline these changes.}

You MS drones amuse me greatly. You don't even know the capabilities of other products yet you feel qualified to knock them.

{Furthermore, MS word having issues with older versions of .Doc is a urban legend spread by anti-ms people. Even if true, there would be no way that OO.o would be able to handle them better. Also OO.o .doc handling is just a hack, no one is going to use it for something important.}

Au contraire - there is no urban legend about it.

MS Word started life as a DOS program. When MS brought out Windows 3.1 there was a flash new GUI version of Word then, but the real application that got people on to Windows 3.1 was Excel. Word didn't really gain market share until Word95 came out along with Windows95.

In the early days of Word the market leaders in wordprocessors were firstly WordStar then later Wordperfect. Word and Wordperfect got into a bit of a market tussel - and one of the key features became how well each one supported the other's format. When that happened, bot MS and Novell started to deliberately obscure the formats so the competitior product would have a hard time reading it.

The eventual outcome was that later versions of the same product also had trouble reading files from the previous versions. Happily, Microsoft discovered that this incompatibility actually worked in their favour, as people had to upgrade in order to be able to still read most documents.

AFAIK in the present day a recent version of MS Office will not read files generated by Word for Windows 3.1 or Word95.

OpenOffice.org will do a better job of reading those files than MS Word itself will. The OpenOffice.org project has in fact expended a great deal of effort deconstructing legacy Office file formats - they are the world experts on the topic. Microsoft on the other hand has expended a great deal of effort over the years in obscuring and trying to keep the formats closed and secret and undecipherable.

It is this very problem of not being able to read MS Office documents created just 10 years ago that Mass. set out to fix in the first place.

"And saving it as a .doc format again defeats the purpose of opendocument. Its important to only have things in one format."

Nonsense. The purpose of Open Document is for long term storage of a document in a standard open format that can be used in the future. If you can save it as a .doc file then so much the better. That, however, is what is known as a value-added feature that resides within your word processor. It has nothing to do with the Open Document format other than to demonstrate that it has potential for flexibility because it's open and programs that understand the format can do intersting things with it.

It's only important to have things in only one format? Why?

"Furthermore, MS word having issues with older versions of .Doc is a urban legend spread by anti-ms people."

You apparently don't upgrade your Office program nor read computer magazines or you wouldn't say something this silly.

"Even if true, there would be no way that OO.o would be able to handle them better."

OO.o doesn't need to handle them better, especially if you're not going to be using them often nor for a long time.

"Also OO.o .doc handling is just a hack, no one is going to use it for something important."

If no one uses hacks why are they important enough to be created in the first place? You defeat your own logic.

"Also, far as sending a .doc file to someone, that would be something you would have to do everytime unless you know they have OO.o ."

And if you know they have OO.o you don't need to do it even once. But you would need to send it in some format that they can read every time no matter what software either of you have or can get. If they actually *want* to hear from you they might be willing to install a free program. It doesn't need to be OO.o. It could be AbiWord today and KWord/KOffice next year once the Windows port is completed. Maybe they have a Solaris box or can boot up from a Sun Java Desktop CD and just pull your doc into Star Office. Are these things unlikely or actually impossible?

Is there a point to this logic chopping? If they don't want to hear from you they can delete your correspondence no matter what format that it's in unless it contains a virus. Word is good for that.

"Sending 2 copies of a file gets even more silly."

Since sending 2 copies is silly, then don't be silly unless you choose to be for some reason ; perhaps you are a comic. A new field: Word Processing Comedy! And here comes some of it now:

"I also find it funny that one person in the article doubts MS claim about PDF support request. Anyone who thinks demand for PDF in Office wouldn't be huge, but thinks people are going to go for OpenDocument in a big way is an idiot. "No way people would demand support for one of the most common document file formats in the world, but for sure they will demand one of the least common"

Do you believe everything MS says, or just that they got requests for PDF support? Would this be the first time they announced support for a feature and then didn't provide it?

Why is PDF support in a word processor huge except that it means that you don't have to buy a PDF writer? If not having to buy the software is huge then aren't you arguing for OO.o? You don't have to buy that and it does .doc and PDF. And it's designed to be a PDF reader as well, not just to publish in PDF format like Office 12.

Why does Office offer WordPerfect formatting? It's not very common, although today it may be more common than Open Document. No big demand for it but MS provides it? Why is that?

Why are they going to switch to a [broken] XML format in Office 12? Because no one was demanding that but it is nearly Open Document compatible which they don't want to provide, at least to Massachussets (and the EU and the Australian National Archive and the governments of Peru and Indonesia).

So much for word processor humor.

"I'm also curious how the format stacks up. I see mention of it supporting change tracking, i'd like to know if it does to the same level you can in MS word. Can multiple people make changes with who did them shown and others accept and decline these changes. That is a hugely used part of MS word in a office environment."

It's free. Why don't you find out. It's a 76.8 MB download for the Windows version of 2.0 rc1. Then your curiosity will be satisfied and you'll know whereof you speak. Let your fingers do the talking.

And if your correspondent needs to be able to read your documents in order to get your business will he just shrug you off or demand that you buy the same kind of software he uses when he can just download one copy of AbiWord or OO.o and install it on as many machines as he wants ( and not install it on machines he coooses not ot put it on)? Now there is some backward thinking.

{And if your correspondent needs to be able to read your documents in order to get your business will he just shrug you off or demand that you buy the same kind of software he uses when he can just download one copy of AbiWord or OO.o and install it on as many machines as he wants ( and not install it on machines he coooses not ot put it on)? Now there is some backward thinking.}

What in heavens name are you on about?

If I am a customer and a correspondent wants my buisness he would be foolish to demand anything at all of me. He might ask me how to read the document I sent - and I could tell him to download OpenOffice.org or I could (since I use openOffice.org myself) re-send my document to him either in Word format or in PDF format.

If I am the buisness and a customer cannot read my documents (because they are in OpenDocument format) then I could (since I use openOffice.org myself) immediately offer that customer a copy of the same document but formatted in Word - but in reality I would actually be giving my customers documents in PDF format, and not in Word or OpenDocument format.

"OpenOffice can read and write MS Wrod .doc files nearly as well as it can OpenDocument format. In fact it does a better job with leagcy Word .doc files than Word itself.
If your correspondent doesn't have OpenOffice and you do, then just send any document to them formatted as a Word document."

Yes, this is one way. I think the biggest today's change is that if your correspondent has no tool to open the OpenDocument-document you sent, you may suggest him to use an open tool (OpenOffice.org or Abiword) to view your document. And all this for free. Forcing the destinator to buy a tool, in order to be able to read the document you sent, seems to me a little bit more critical. The destinator has no real excuses for not beeing able to read your doc.