[OO]pening MS Office

So one of my biggest issues with using Open Source technologies here at Freelock comes with perhaps the easiest task most business people do on a day to day basis, and that is using a piece of office productivity software and sharing it with someone else. Long description made short, I can't simply whip up a document and send it to a client.

Why you ask? Well, we use Open Office which is Open Source, free to download, and overall usage and look is pretty close to MS Office technologies like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access. Whats even better is that I can open up all those Word documents you send my way, edit them in my little Open Office Word Processor, and save them as a "*.doc" file and shoot it back. 

So whats the problem with Erik and why is he complaining about Open Office?

Here's the source of my life's frustration. I open up my Open Office Word Processor, write a brilliant looking and sounding proposal that will attract thousands of dollars in revenue, even attach a nice looking image onto it, and save it. Well, that beautiful document just got saved in "*.odf" format, known also as the OpenDocument format, which looks great on my Ubuntu-powered HP, but can't even be opened on my clients Windows XP Dell! So I spend 5 minutes saving it in either a "*.doc" format and explaining that I use Open Office so if it looks funky, please excuse it, or I save it as a "*.pdf" and say if you want to make some changes, I can do it here.

Thats the point at which my "office productivity suite" sours.

Which leads me to my news find of the day. Microsoft Documents Its ODF Support! Microsoft has finally listened to the minority of us who use Open Office and decided to allow their majority to see my documents in their Open excellence.

I don't hand out many thumbs up to Microsoft, but I applaud this effort since it will hopefully make my life and the lives of other minority Open Source business users a little easier.

Now if I could only get Internet Explorer to display websites consistantly! Patience, young Open Sourcer, patience...