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OpenOffice.org Team Releases Version 1.0
DenialS writes: "Congratulations to the OpenOffice.org team! Version 1.0 of the open office suite has been released. I'm downloading it now; I've had good luck with the previous stable builds. Release notes haven't been posted yet, so I can't say what the major differences are between 1.0 and the previous stable build, 641d, but I'm looking forware to finding out!"
Here is a good question:
Is there a converter/plugin for Word (latest versions also) that goes the other way?? ie, Save em in the nice xml star/openoffice format, and when folks say they can't open em, post em the filter.
Subvert the dominant paradigm and all that guff.
The problem:: One of the big complaints about moving to OSS is that people insist that they need to be able to exchange MS Word documents with other people around the country. Now, I hate sending or receiving Word docs when typing the text in the email would work just as well, but some people seem to only communicate by sending Word docs as attachments. Of course, OpenOffice can read from and write to Word format, but natively it writes to its own open format, and its a hassle to constantly save-as just to send a document as an attachment.
Solution: develop a mail server module that uses OpenOffice. When a mail going out of the network has an OpenOffice word processing document attached, the module automatically creates a version of the document converted to MS Word and adds it as an attachment. Conversely, mail coming into the network automatically converts Word->OpenOffice adds the attachments. By default, documents sent internally in the network (for some flexible definition of "internally") are not converted. A nice added touch would be to allow users to have their own settings on when conversions should be done. They could set users or entire domains who don't get conversions, choose to have documents substituted instead of added, etc.
Miko O'Sullivan