"With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft's office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck."
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Member since:2005-07-22
um, because, strangely enough a text document and a spreadsheet are wildly different things. Since Word and Excel are different programs have one file type for different kinds of document is just confusing.
Consider right, on Windows you can assign one program to be the default for a particular type of file. You cannot persuade Windows to remember which program opens which individual file.
Therefore to cope with a single file type that handles all the different kinds of applications, you'd have to create a mini application whose job it is to open all documents and "hand them on" to the correct application - very confusing to use!
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Member since:2005-07-06
Therefore to cope with a single file type that handles all the different kinds of applications, you'd have to create a mini application whose job it is to open all documents and "hand them on" to the correct application - very confusing to use!
Confusing! This is how it's supposed to work! If I open a document I want a couple thing in this order:
1. A quick and usable presentation of the data. There shouldn't be an application dependence for this. What the OS decides should do the rendering (libpoppler or gecko or whatever...) is of no interest.
2. Availibillity of assorted tools to work with the data.
I don't think the application model does this very good. The inherent bloatedness of applications makes number 1 harder and harder to accomplish in a satisfying manner the more potent it gets in 2.
It may seem that the application model sacrifises 1 to be bettar at 2. But it sucks at that too. It's impossible to implement all the tools anyone could ever use in one application.
The tools should be free. The OS should assist you in having them in reachable places. That could be by restoring the last tool pile for each and every uniqe data file. It could be by managing "perspective" as the Eclipse IDE does it. Much research has to be done to find the best way to do this.
The important thing is that the current model sacrifices 1 to do a very bad job at 2. This has to change.
Member since:
can someone explain why MS uses different file formats for word .doc and excel .xls etc rather than just one format say "ofd"
Gobe stored everything as one file, and Gobe all the components was integrated.