Up yours, M$

[Dr Mordrid]

Open Document standard advancing....

First ISO approval, now Massachutetts will mandate its use in State government. Today Mass., tomorrow....

[Sasq]

You have no idea how happy this makes me.
I am reminded of the domino scene from 'Robots'

[Jammrock]

Yes, I've been seeing these articles pop up lately. ISO approved the standard, and then one company, I forget the name, sent MA a Word plug-in that fully supports ODF and DOC to ODF conversion without loss of functionality. Very nice.

For my story website I have ODF as an approved format and recommend OO.o to anyone who doesn't want to fork out cash for Word.

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm a huge fan of OpenOffice & recommend it at every opportunity. 'tis a great piece of software....open source or not

[Sasq]

Aye, it is my prefered as well, I don't need the complexity of M$ Office.
made more complicated by the fact I don't even have a windows install at home.

Sadly I am still trying to convince my office into swapping over.

Step by step, boss likes the idea, just until I got here, our software (that we make) is based in Access, so all our customers use office atm etc, wait till I get them all over to java apps, then make em switch

[Jessterw]

While I love the mission of OpenOffice and OpenDocument is one of the best things to come about in that area, the former still feels like a bad copy of Word and the rest of Office. There are some nice features that MS Office doesn't have, but they are making the same interface mistakes MS did with Office (and have been trying for years to fix by introducing more glut). OO is just as complex as Office save for the collaboration and MS-centric features found in the latter.

That all said, I install OO instead of MS Office on any Windows of Linux system I use, and I recommend it to anyone as an alternative to the other. Most people who have switched to it have found it does everything they need, though the biggest complaint has been that it's not always intuitive and is often inconsistent. I still use MS Office on my Mac, but that's largely because OO is still too buggy for me on that platform, nevermind that it just doesn't play well on it.

Back to topic, I can see no reason for ODF to not advance further except that there still exists some reluctance to endorse the format in the wake of MS' own format push. The pressure is there and it's slowly increasing.

[High_Jumbllama]

I'm a huge fan of OpenOffice & recommend it at every opportunity. 'tis a great piece of software....open source or not

I use it at home and some at the office and put it on everyone's machine that "try" to get me to install a "copy" of M$ Office. For most people it is fine and they don't have to pay a couple hundred dollars for software that they would barely use. One thing I don't understand about M$ fanatics is why they insist on Office instead Works or Works Suite. The latter is really god containg a full copy of Word, Works, Encarta and Streets and Tips, etc . . .

[Helevitia]

I use Office extensively at work. I use Openoffice at home. Office is much easier to use IMHO.

Go ahead, try to figure out how to fit 6 slides on apage and print it out that way. Sounds simple enough, but it isn't. Office is a piece of cake, but Openoffice was very painful.

Office is much more polished as well. If you are just using and printing basic docs, then it is a no brainer, but once I started using advanced features, it really is more painful with Openoffice.

Now, I'm all for open standards and this is a positive move, but Openoffice has a little ways to go to catch up.

[GNEP]

I have to use Excel. Otherwise will end up in Openoffice when at home for other stuff invariably (have both that and MS Office installed). If it wasn't for my life revolving around spreadsheets though, I might've made the switch (and yes, I need spreadsheets to operate PRECISELY as I build them, so have to actually end up going as far as making sure I've got the same version of Excel at home as at wherever I currently work...)

[Jessterw]

This is another reason that while I'm hopeful for ODF, I'm a bit wary about the applications that support it. Developers, especially those of the (F)OSS variety, tend to be ignorant about accessibility issues, and often those that aren't are not proactive about implementation.

It is good to see that IBM and Sun are working towards better support in this area, and at least there is a plug-in for MS Office for ODF support, so that those who depend on Office's excellent accessilibity options can still migrate to ODF.