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Re: Great ida!
by Luther John on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @11:48
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"They should instead distribute the files in a format that was created for distribution purposes (e.g. pdf, html, rtf). I realise that this is not always possible since there doesn't exist that kind of format for every application domain."
Hello Magnus!
The problem is that in the real world, users can't possibly always do this. My entire office has years and years of (perhaps gigabytes) of MS Word proposals, hundreds of PowerPoint presentations, and a great deal of MS Excel spreadsheets. There are also a lot of very old WordPerfect documents, but those are from the earlier 90's.
We have a enormous investment in MS Office, and currently, 100% of the office machines have MS Office loaded in them. When people in our office need to take home, 99% of the time, it's not a problem because they have MS Office at home.
The problem is for the other (growing) 1%, like me. It's a huge barrier to switching to some alternative OS like Linux without having compatability with existing documents, and being able to effectively communicate with others (which means, the ability to export MS Office docs is important too)
In fact, I was pretty much a hobbist with Linux until OpenOffice came along. Since then, I've been able to switch to Linux full time at home. I've also been using Koffice for years, and I love it's interface compared to OO's crappy interface, but I couldn't really use it for anything serious. And I still can't until there is a way to natively open MS documents (wether it be through OpenOffice, I don't care..)
To me, Koffice doesn't really need to have any more features than OpenOffice.. it just needs to provide a better interface than the crappy java OpenOffice interface. |
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Re: Great ida!
by Magnus Johansson on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @12:25
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"The problem is for the other (growing) 1%, like me. It's a huge barrier to switching to some alternative OS like Linux without having compatability with existing documents, and being able to effectively communicate with others (which means, the ability to export MS Office docs is important too)"
I agree with pretty much everything you say, but IMHO the solution is not koffice swithing to the OO-format, but rather work on the import/export filters.
I don't think it's wrong if they base the koffice format upon the OO one, but if they restrict themselves from extending and/or modifying it to suit their needs, they're making a mistake IMO.
(Disclaimer: I haven't looked at either file format, but AFAIK they're both based on XML. I have, however, done similar work in another application domain.)
/Magnus
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Re: Great ida!
by Peter Simonsson on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @15:01
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David Faure is a member of the OASIS group that works on the standard, so I'm pretty sure he will cater for koffice's needs. :)
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Re: Great ida!
by Nicolas Goutte on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @15:05
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Nobody has said that there will be no private extensions ot the OO format (OASIS being a public extension compared to OO version 1.0) But I think that we need long before we even get to that border.
As for working on import/export filters, sorry, but when there is not any programmer, you cannot do much. (Volunteers, email to koffice@kde.org please.)
Have a nice day!
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