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Microsoft Prepares Office Lock-in
An anonymous reader writes "NEWS.COM has an article describing Office 2003's DRM features for documents. This will not only coerce those running older versions of Office to upgrade, which has been a problem for MS in the last few years, but it will also shut out competing software, such as OpenOffice. Now think about this for a second. Even if the developers of a competing office suite could figure out how to get their software to open an Office 2003 document, doing so would be a DMCA violation, since they'd be bypassing an anti-circumvention device. I certainly hope the OpenOffice team will kick development into high gear. If there was a time we need a viable competitor to Office, it's now."
An important feature is the VB scripting in Excel, at least for me, and being able to issue commands to other applications from within these scripts. This may very well be ignorance on my part - but is there anything else that would allow to do this as easily?
This is for QUICK and EASY scripts - so don't tell me to use something I can't record scripts directly in and easily debug (if I want powerfull I'll code it in C). Also, it would be nice if it ran on Windows and Mac without modifications to the scripts.
However I guess these features will be of little use to me once I can't have access to my Excel files/scripts unless I pay a hefty license fee to Microsoft every year.