Must be the Microsoft version then…
…Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to gain approval in a vote by a sub-group of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), a standards body influential with the US government.
OOXML has strong support from Microsoft, and is a rival to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) favoured by open-source vendors and companies such as IBM. But while ODF has gained important acceptance from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), OOXML is still struggling to be seen as a truly open.
Microsoft can’t bring themselves to use ODF. Is it because it would show that they have little to bring to the table with the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems using it already? All in all, not very credible as part of their ‘openness’ drive.
Note: I have been using ODF based OpenOffice for over a year now and haven’t looked back.
Leo Plaw
on Aug 4th, 2007
@ 12:46 pm:
Yes, same here. I had to reinstall XP on my laptop two months ago, which meant having to reinstall all of the other software. So I came to the point of installing MS Office. I thought, hey better time than any to try out Open Office. I was very impressed how it had no problems with opening any of my MS Office files, it had all of the same features I needed, and, was free! Like yourself, I haven’t looked back, and every time I use it, I’m just so happy I made the switch.
Being pleased with my choice, I made a donation to Open Office.
Brian Sexton
on Oct 3rd, 2007
@ 22:37 pm:
There are things I do not like about OpenOffice.org—from the ridiculous name (*.org) to the horizontal rules, the list tools, the header and footer measurements, and some general user-interface clunkiness—but it meets most of my needs well enough and in this case, good enough really is good enough, but just barely. It is not great and I wish it were better than it is, but it is a good alternative to the absurdly overpriced Microsoft Office suites.