This is a general replay to
Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?
illustrating my personal situation, and why my answer is *yes*.
I moved from Microsoft Office Professional to Word Perfect Office
Professional probably 12 to 13 years ago. The reason for the
professional versions is that I needed a database as well as an office
suite. When Open Office first came out, I moved to it, starting with
version .9 something. I needed to keep Paradox as my database at that
time. Once Base became available with Open Office, I was able to move to
Base and drop proprietary software for an office suite completely. Once
I had everything in Open Office, I had one major step forward for
someday moving to Linux instead of Windows. I made that transition 2 1/2
years ago. I get many attachments from co-workers and other
organizations that are sent in Microsoft format. Most of these documents
are relatively simple. I've not had anyone send me anything in docx
format I couldn't read. Generally I will need to adjust margins, or
something like that. I'm 97% Windows free. I only use it for video
editing and for a forms program which will not work with Wine in Linux.
Most of the people who send me these attachments are using what they are
required to use, which is Microsoft. If I could not be somewhat
compatible with them, Open Office or LibreOffice now, would be of no
value to me at all.
If we could get back to the big push of several years for governments to
adopt odf standards for all of their documents, we would all be a lot
better off. But that push would never work if there wasn't some backward
compatibility for the former Microsoft users to be able to open previous
documents.
Don
--
***
*
Privacy Policy |
Impressum (Legal Info) |
Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified, all text and images
on this website are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is
licensed under the Mozilla Public License (
MPLv2).
"LibreOffice" and "The Document Foundation" are
registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are
in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective
logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use
thereof is explained in our
trademark policy.