Reply to post: Re: Better but still a bit of a pigs ear

Re: Better but still a bit of a pigs ear

Nevertheless, I wish them luck trying to exchange odf documents produced variously by MS Word, Libre Office Word, Open Office Word, and Abiword. Spreadsheets might be fun, Access databases will be inaccessible, and nobody pays attention to presentations.

Any MS format prior to that MSOOXML abomination open just fine in both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and even MS itself can't really get MSOOXML to work because it was never written to be *used*, only to spoil adoption of the Open Document Format (and I am VERY glad that that effort has now failed, making the UK compliant with the EU standard).

As for MS, try opening an early generation MS document. You can actually manage that with OOo, but NOT, ironically, with MS Office. A government has a need for long term data retention - with ODF this is stable, whereas it was actually an active strategy of MS to cause incompatibilities because it was the only way people would exchange a reasonably working application for a new one (that. and the hope that some things actually finally worked, although that technique was more used with Windows).

With paper, try duplication, maintenance, long term storage.. Not a chance.