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Why OpenOffice.org? Open Document Formats
Jem Berkes writes "In this current article about OpenOffice.org (also covered at Linux Today), I try to make a point about OpenOffice's commitment to open document formats and interchange as the strongest selling point - never mind cost. The OOo developers are putting a lot of effort into their XML format; will this pay off, and will users notice the significance of OpenDocument/OASIS document formats?" This can't be said enough: file formats are what determine whether and how easily data is portable, or whether the user is just stuck.
There's a cool interview with Sam Hiser of OpenOffice.org here
Why no SVG support, then?
Someone had to do it.
Speaking of superior file formats, has anyone else noticed just how much smaller OOo files are than the comparable MS Office documents? I routinely have to export files to MSO formats for peer review, and I have always marvelled at the amount of space a .doc takes by comparison.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284
I wish people would stop touting stability as a superiority of software products. I use OO and MS Office regularly, and both have crashed on me, or done very flaky things, such as refusing to save a file for some unknown reason. I'm a more than average user, but not some elitist who has configured my machine perfectly, and if I can't get things not to crash, then your average user isn't going to be able to either. They'll try the program, excited by it's superior crash record, it'll crash once, and then they'll get burned, blame the software and never try again. There's plenty of good reasons to use OSS software, but stability wise, it's no better, and note no worse, in my books than an MS product.
So for once the unwashed are comming to _me_ saying 'I can't read this'.
If it ever goes away I shall have to switch back to mailing them raw TeX files again.
Beep beep.
Its funny how a free piece of software like OpenOffice.org can out-do Microsoft Office. Every format that Office produces can be read by OOo but anytime you try opening a non-Office-formatted document in Office, it freaks out and asks you to define the encoding. But it doesn't have a single encoding that will work, ever. Yes, regular text and even RTF can be opened by Office but the point is Office just can't handle anything that wasn't originally created by MS.
"You see them trees out back, I take care of them. I'm a tree, I'm a tree wizard." - Crazy Homeless Guy
However I have tried hard to switch to OpenOffice. Even our business people have tried to use it. And the sad truth is that it just sucks. There is no way in hell that OpenOffice competes with Microsoft Office for usability. The PowerPoint clone is especially weak: in PP, common buttons like "make the font bigger" are prominently displayed, while in OO you have to hunt hard for the button in the customization menus, and even then it doesn't work right.
This is not to say that OO is not a valuable asset. Clearly a lot of people have worked hard on it. But don't kid ourselves, this beast has a long way to go yet just to compete with MS Office 97, never mind 2003.
Crispin
This is great news. I use OpenOffice in my small town law practice, and I'm so happy to be liberarted from the tyranny of proprietary licensing fees. Lack of compatibility between software packages (office, accounting, case mgmt., etc.) is an even bigger problem for law offices in rural areas, like mine, who want to explore open source but lack support services.
I'm learning --- ever so slowly --- more about Linux and Samba so I can complete the office transformation some day. Its hard to find patient teachers, and tech understanding comes slowly to some of us. Its worth the effort though.
I'm laughing at clouds.
... almost every file I save in Open Office gets saved as a .doc/.xls rather than an OOo format (I can't even think of the file extensions of the top of my head, thats how infrequently I use them). If the file I am saving has to be sent to anyone, or opened on a machine other than my own, I have to go with Microsoft compatability, even though it annoys me intensly.
Write a Firefox Extension that enables OpenOffice documents to be viewed in the browser, or edited if OOo is present on the system? (yes, this would be a lot of work)
.Doc files and the free MS Word Viewer to distribute written documents.
Suddenly you have an alternative to the traditional recipe of using
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
"The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless... "
To those who don't understand XML, but that's OK. We love you in spite of your faults.
The main one that most people overlook is the ability to edit a section of a document and only have that section change. With binary files, like MS Word, if someone opens it up and makes one small change, then the whole file gets changed. This difference comes into play when you start considering the ability to diff files, and to use these diffs for applications such as LBFS (low bandwidth file system), or log based file systems. There is a lot of technology out there that could lead to great improvements on network/disk usage if non-binary filetypes are adopted more regularly. Currently you can only use text based files in these systems. Imagine if you could use CVS with binary files (and actually harvest the benefits of using such a system). Just my 2 cents though.
Not necessarily true. Reverse-engineering XML (at least, XML that is not purposely obfuscated) is orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering binary formats, because it is a self-descriptive format. Each piece of data has a name associated with it automatically -- the name of the tag -- as well as a rough structure (clearly this 'size' is for font size, not page size, since it's within a font tag). And just as importantly, XML tells you exactly where an 'array' of items ends because it has a /tag. With a binary format, the count for the array will typically precede the array, but does not have to... in a particularly complex format the length of the array can be implied by other parameters, and you have to use multiple samples to find out how exactly it is implied where it ends, and even when you think it's figured out it probably isn't, and the files that don't fit your assumptions will crash or produce garbage when read in.
A proprietary XML file is not at all proprietary compared to a binary file. They're easy for even a novice programmer to figure out how to read.
Random and weird software I've written.
Why I love software that saves as XML? You can edit their saved files with a simple text-editor (vim!), and that saved my ass once: I had to do a rather complex layout with the great DTP program Scribus, and (being still in development) some bug made it crash. Luckily Scribus saved the file before/while crashing, so I hadn't lost everything, but everytime I'd open it, Scribus would crash.
Using a proprietary data-format, I'd be lost now. Using an XML-Format, I just open the file in a text-editor, check what happenend since my last (regular) save, copy&pasted the changes step by step to the old file, until it crashed.
Then one step back, analyze the problem, send bug-report to Scribus-developers and be a happy man.
Open, well-documented formats will allow governments and businesses to access documents/info many years from now. It's unfortunate that most IT managers don't realize how closed formats will hinder them in the future.
OMG the parent was modified up as insightful!!!
The point of XML isnt that its human readable. Its that its machine PARSIBLE and that one can use a rather large number of tools in order to process the CONTENT without having to deal with all the proprietary ***** that is normally in there.
Being able to apply XSL alone on a document means it incredibly simplifys the process of converting from one format to another WITHOUT having to learn YA proprietary format/tools.
And to give you an idea of the value of this - Ive just spent 3 weeks converting a LARGE word document to XHTML (properly, i.e. its accessible, well formed etc etc). If this document had been written in OO (or if it had been possible to import it into OO without OO having convulsions on many of the tables), Id easily have shaved a week off that work.
In another procect, I use a similar technique to visualize raw data given by CSV (e.g. Adsense data). It saves me a bunch of work I'd had to do manually in Excel.
Magic like this would not be able utilizing proprietary file formats. OOo's XML file format has made my life easier. And I love OOo for it :)
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
<data>
AAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBBBB
</data>
Someone could wrap a binary file with XML tags. Is it suddenly more readable than before?
You are right, still XML is a hard hitting buzz word that has the attention of the politicians. XML and open formats have been synonymous at least in my country (Denmark) where open formats is something no politicians talk against (as opposed to open source).
One of the largest problems I have had with coworkers/friends/family when they switch to OO.o is the document format. Sure, it works great on their own computer, and even takes up less space. However, I was phoned at one o'clock in the morning from a Kinko's because someone had to print up a report and the computers there didn't have OO.o.
.sxw format be the default will help OO.o get into the mainstream. However, this is faulty logic. The person I talked about above ended switching back to MS Office because she just wanted things to work all the time. Even though she had no previous problems with OO.o, and I explained to her that you _could_ save in .doc format, she switched anyway. Her words: "I just can't stand being stranded."
The problem (IMO) with OO.o is that it saves the documents in its own format by default. Sure, you can select to save it to any number of formats, but most people just type it a name and check "OK." This leads to many, many problems when it comes time to interact with other computers.
Some might say that having the
I think that the open source community should really take those words to heart. If OS wants to grow, developers are going to have to step away from their niche market of people who really care about software being free and all that jazz. People just want things to work.
Quick test / shameless plug: Try to decode the file format for the saved layouts from http://www.morpheussoftware.net/ anybody.
Morphing Software
I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:
To say the fact they're documenting the format it is more important than the fact it's in XML is true, but that doesn't make it unimportant they're using XML.
There's SVG support. It's just not particularly good.
http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm
However someone is working on it, and there's enough documentation out there, you can too.
"XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format..."
I'd say that's a pretty good reason right there, especially compared to a non-human-readable one (MS).
I wonder how feasible it would be for other word processors, such as AbiWord, to use this format natively. Or, at least appear to use the format natively.
That is, after all, what happens in other areas: MS owns the market leading, proprietary, format/protocol, and then the others rally around an open alternative.
BTW, I don't think that the XML encoding is important. What matters is that the format is legally open, that it is published with good documentation, and that there is nothing hidden in it to tie people to OOo.
XML is not a file format. It is a text markup language.
The file format of OOo XML files is gzipped ASCII.
KFG
Try http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/
If your open office file is put on a disk and the disk portion with your data on it gets even the slightest bit corropted then doesn't doom any chance of recovering that file? Maybe I just spend too much time recovering files from old floppy disks gone bad that people send me and this isn't much of a problem anymore.
I favor html to the doc (in any shape or form), but what I do like about OOo is it's file conversions, which are still a little clunky, but they're still usable. I find the following especially useful:
- html->doc: For when I am forced into submitting something in doc format. There'll be a link to the real html document on the first line of the doc, guaranteed
:-) Too bad the CSS ins't handled better...
- doc->pdf: Good for making nice clean finished docs, even if they're bloated.
And it's all free.A-Day
I'm all for open file formats. That's why our own TextMaker 2005 will support OpenDocument (née Oasis) and OOo file formats. Not that developing a filter was much less daunting than developing our Microsoft Word filter... ;-)
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
People tend not to 'upgrade', usually every 3 years when the computers are replaced, people get the latest Windows and Office on it. Which happens to be WinXP and Office2k3.
I have to say the most impressive thing about Office is VBA. It works in all Office apps and is very very simple yet exceedingly powerful. Any replacement needs perfect VBA understanding.
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For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments explains how important not being locked in is to doing transparent government work in addition to treating citizens well. I'm sure he's not the only one, but his letter to Microsoft is well worth reading.
Digital Citizen
I would still fear working with binary formats (not that the example I cite is properly documented, but the bits people have figured out give me nightmares).
Well written XML, yes. MS Office in XML A89172BC098123...
I recently worked as a consultant for a biotech company. They where developing health care drugs for the American market, and one of all FDA regulations they had to follow, was that all documents regarding some substance or drug must be available for at least 10 years time, or more.
This was a big reason they did NOT adopt open office, because in their corporate world (that is the opposite of real life) Microsoft Office was the guarantee that their documents would be accessible in 10 years, or more. I disagreed and did some arguing with them for the importance of open formats, but in the end they choosed Microsoft Office. Because; In the corporate world, Microsoft is king.
I believe they made the wrong choice and (IMO) the correct way of following FDA regulations, etc, is to use open formats for data/documents/etc. However this has not yet been realized by the industry (or FDA, I believe).
However, when the industry DO realize, all open formats will be at a very nice spot compared to Microsoft Office/closed document formats.
I have to agree with the GP post ... it's not the format, it's the documentation of the format that matters.
Let's say that OOo were to disappear one day, replaced with another suite from somewhere else. If that new suite also documented its format, it would be simple, if not completely trivial, to write a convert program to convert from OOo to the new suite. Nothing here is fundamentally different just because OOo uses XML.
The only difference between XML and other formats is that with XML you may not need to write a parser. But that's not an incredibly difficult piece to write once. (Writing a generic XML parser is a bit more difficult.) Even if both suites used XML, but used different schema because they look at data completely differently, the difficult part would be the semantic conversion (from layouts based on, say, paragraphs to pages or something).
I mean, really. The article is very terse, and says nothing that hasn't been beaten to death on Slashdot every month or so.
Heck, if the article had even been somewhat comprehensive, I wouldn't have minded. But it appears to me that this article was approved simply to get Open Office more exposure (with nothing new promised).
Beetle B.
Ok, so the great innovators at Microsoft patented using XML to store a word processing document.
If you are going to take into account all things that have been patented you can well stop developing software altogether (I found your comment informative, anyway, sorry if I sounded offensive).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"WtF?!" you might ask :) A collegue tried switching to OpenOffice. We got into swapping a PowerPoint document back and forth, and at some point I started getting .ppt files that PowerPoint97 could not open, claiming that the file had been created by a future version of PowerPoint. So something is broken in OpenOffice's "export to PowerPoint" that is emitting files that PowerPoint97 cannot read.
Oh, the irony. Forced to upgrade to Office 2003 because someone in my organization tried OpenOffice :(
Crispin
Of course they can patent blatantly obvious ones. You forget how carefully the USPTO researches each and every application to make sure that the patent claims are both non-obvious and not covered by existing prior art.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Whether or not a file format is closed or open, isn't what's going to drive users preferences. Users generally don't care.
The place where the open oo format can rule, is by integrating its use with other open software. Things like, an Apache server that can *create* the document format based on data it holds. By writing php scripts that can output their data directly into spreadsheets that contain formulas etc. Imagine a web application that allows the user to modify the spreadsheet online, without having to download/upload the whole thing. Think collaboration. This is where MS is trying to get too.
The power lies in finding the advantage of documented file formats. But, the first step is creating and documenting them. We just don't have that *killer* app yet.
What? Why? It's very easy to reverse engineer it. I could do a good bit of it myself.
If there is already a Macro language that works in a very similar way it would not take much effort to fill in the gaps and change the syntax so it's VBA compatible.
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That project does sound truly heinous, but there's a Perl program called the Demoronizer which can help with those MS-Office -> HTML conversions. Even though it wouldn't help with the formatting issues, it's still a good starting point..
XML can be orders of magnetude easier. It always should be. (I don't like to use the word always, but this is a genuine ALWAYS, as in XML should NEVER approach the complexity of Perl or C++). However, coders frequently don't take maximum advantage of XML's simplicity.
Just look at the XML parts of Winamp 5. Colors are specified on a scale running from about +4,000 to -4,000 for each shade, instead of say 24 bit RGB, and including other required settings. Various parts of the skin may get variable names like "Glass Highlight", "Glass Substrate Highlight", "Glass Shadow Highlight", "Glassy Text Area", "Glassy Text Substrate Area" and "Glassy Text Shadow Substrate Highlight Area", all in the same skin, or buttons defined only as the "Hard Button Group" and the "Soft Button Group", with no method except hack in some value and run the program, to figure out which is which. Some skins with 80 colors themes or so include a 150 Kb+ XML file.
These examples come from skins with good, professional graphics, and even well written code in other areas. i.e. some people who are actually coding whole new functions into the Maki code still don't hesitate to write XML like this to accompany it. At this rate, we could use an obfuscated XML contest.
Who is John Cabal?
Koffice is in the process of transistioning to the OOo formats. I can hardly wait. I love the framebased workflow of Koffice but have trouble if I want to use those documents outside of koffice.
which it actually does if you're adding images
Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.
Do this experiment. Create an OpenOffice.org document. Embed an image in the document. Save the document. Rename the sxw file to zip. Open the zip file using your favorite method. Notice that the image is a separate file and not a part of the content.xml file.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.
Sorry mate, your entire post is correct with the exception of the word "Nonsense!".
While it's true the images themselves are saved as seperate files inside the zip archive, their properties (like size and alternative text) are stored inside the content.xml file as SVG properties.
With your experiment, try opening content.xml and search for the svg:width and svg:height properties for instance.
script the .doc with a macro virus.
that'll show them.
...
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)
The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...
Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).
You should care that it's XML...
SXWs are zipped XML files.
zdiff (1) - compare compressed files
If that won't work out-of-the-box, it could be made to easily.
Don't lose graphics in imported Word documents.
When you export Word documents, they need to have file sizes that are similar to what they would have if you saved them with Word. I can't email someone back a document that has had a huge increase in file size. Word is bad enough with file sizes, but OO.o is much, much worse.
Don't crash so much. That's just annoying.
A grammar checker would be nice. Word and Wordperfect have had this for over a decade.
Faster load times would be great. Word loads in about one second on my computer; there is no excuse for OO.o taking more than ten seconds.
This is just a minor nit, but still... I use a text editor to edit text documents. OO.o shouldn't claim that its formatted word processor document is a text document.
The dialog box that asks if you are sure you want to export to a non-native file format because you might lose information should tell you what information you might lose. When I import a document, add a few sentences, then save it, I should not be seeing this nonsensical warning. In fairness, Word has this problem as well for some older formats, although not for Word 97 or later formats.
My most annoying point to me(since this one means I can't even use OO.o for documents that I distribute in pdf form only): support for using custom styles for section numbering.
Fix the last one of those and I will use OO.o again. Fix most of them and I will give it another try for regular use. Right now, though, OO.o is as useful to me as Wordperfect for the Atari ST is.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
So you would get the reply: "PDF or plaintext, please"
Even if they required MS office on the conversion machine (for mass conversions). Yes, even OOo doesn't handle everything perfectly and has to deal with a moving target.
.DOC email attachments, despite good efforts to educate.
Part of the problem in migration (last I checked) was no nice and reliable way to massivly convert the piles of ms office files to OOo. If users would find a DOC file they'd just go hunting for a machine with word on it. They would also freak out dealing with
If the users only saw properly rendered OOo files, this problem of adoption would disappear.
Ideally I'd love to see something that would search a whole network for ms office docs and convert them, archive the ms office files as originals and only leave OOo files 'easily' accessable. I'd write one but my skills in this type of thing are too rusty at the moment.
Firefox &
Given that this is Slashdot, I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised to discover that nobody has pointed out that Office 2k3 has an XML document format: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=FE118952-3547-420A-A412-00A2662442D9&displa ylang=en
Boss wanted me to create a PostScript version of our corporate logo, so it could be scaled as needed.
Source: a poorly rendered GIF.
Equipment: one Linux machine, with OpenOffice.org installed.
I found the matching font, got the dots lined up, converted it to a traced object, found the right "burnt sienna" color... but that pukey-green was nowhere in any color selector I could find.
After hunting for nearly a half hour, for an edit box that would let me enter an arbitrary hex triplet, I just saved the file and quit OOo. Then I unzipped the document, opened the style sheet in NEdit, and changed the hex triplets by hand. Save, exit, re-zip, and open it in OOo to see if the changes were correct. Voila!
I never, never ever would have been able to do that in a Microsoft product. I will grant that Microsoft may have made the hex triplet entry somewhat more obvious, but that doesn't mean I would have been able to find it any more easily. They absolutely control how the user accesses the document. OOo lets you access it any way you want.
In the real world civil suits usually end in settlements that leave both parties more or less where they began. There is compensation for damages, but life goes on.
It is a waste of time to dwell upon an argument that fundamentally leads nowhere.
Let's have some prior art to this statement. ;)
Several of us have maintained for quite some time [that] Microsoft wanted to patent their XML format so something such as OpenOffice can't write to MS Office. You can see the format, read the format, but not write the format. Frustrate the geeks. (don't think this happened by mistake in Redmond)
It also forces the business-end of decisions when it comes to migrating away from MS Office.
Noone is going to move from one app to another overnight in a large environment, no matter how good or inexpensive the proposition. This means a one-way bridge...everyone who moves across can't come back just as their material can't come back.
Why is Microsoft so touchy about MS Office? It represents [at least] 1/3 of their profit (not revenue, profit). They have to protect their cash cow someway until they can supplement it with another pass-the-hat release of Windows.
Pass-the-hat as in what they did with 98SE, ME as intermediate releases of 98 before XP was done cooking. Add a couple of changes, pass the hat around, those who buy anything new will pay and the revenue stream increases a little bit. This is why the mags are jumping on XP-to-Longhorn intermediate releases - more income until Longhorn is done.
There is a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, between implementing "buzzword compliance" and actually encoding the structure of an object in XML. I can see how publishers of proprietary programs could abuse the letter of the W3C Recommendations by having their programs shove a base64 encoded binary in an undocumented format into an XML element and then trying to sell their programs using a misleading claim that the result benefits from being XML. Should that practice become commonplace, W3C will probably issue a release that strongly deprecates that practice, if it hasn't already.
You can obfuscate XML content just as easily as you do with binary structures, while still having a perfectly valid XML document.
So what?
With XML you have to put work into obfuscating it, and you have the possibility of having a clear and reasonably self-documenting format.
With binary formats its already obfuscated from the start. If I hand someone a binary file, were is the built-in indication of endian-ness, work length, data labelling or structure?
I just looked at the OpenOffice file format specification. The page from which it is downloaded states:
Presumably brought to us by the department of redundancy department. The specification itself is a PDF that was obviously created in OpenOffice. It is 571 pages long, and yet doesn't include a PDF table of contents, making it very hard to navigate (these are created automatically from any LaTeX document including the hyperref package). It contains things that look like hyperlinks. These probably aren't meant to be - they are XML namespaces - but OpenOffice has converted them to hyperlinks (and made them blue to highlight this) and then completely failed to make them clickable in the PDF. This is completely inconsistent. Either they are links, in which case clicking on them should do something, or they are not links, in which case they should not be randomly made blue and underlined.[1] A word processor does the same thing to words that a food processor does to food.
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On the wander back from the pub last night I got to thinking about open formats (yeah I'm that sad..) and came to the following conclusion.
A long time ago the bible was only available in Latin. Very, very few lay people could understand Latin and hence most had to use the services of a priest to read, and interpret, said tome for them. In other words a nice little earner for the priests who carved themselves a niche as "official middlemen to Grud" and who resisted all attempts to break up this monopoly. (Hmmm... methinks they were more like the *AA of their day)
Anyway I think it's simple. Proprietary data formats return us to the spirit of these times.
Lets face it, the only use for a computer is as a tool (admittedly a tremendously versatile and powerful tool). To all intents and purposes the only thing that's really important are the results of using that tool. i.e your data.
Saving your data in a non open format is like putting your work at the mercy of a "digital priest". It's simply stupid. And on this note then having had numerous run ins with data in crappy undocumented formats over the years I have also learnt the lesson of the Unix masters first hand. i.e. Wherever possible use plain text (ASCII or EBCIDIC)
Personally I will no longer use a tool that doesn't produce data in an open format. The tool itself can be licensed however the writers choose (I'm quite happy to pay for good tools) but if MY data isn't stored in an open format then, unless there really is no alternative and I simply must get the job done, I won't use the tool.
People who don't understand this argument leave themselves open to extortion and, quite simply, deserve everything they get.
Furthermore if data's held in an open format everyone can compete on a level playing field to produce the best tool to manipulate it.
So, to get back on topic, not only is OpenOffice.org a very capable office suite but the data's held in a published open format and the authors are commited to keeping it that way. It's got my vote. It's on my desktop. It's staying there.
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This sounds like it may be important for historical and archival uses, too, where you want to keep your older documents over time and not have to worry about them becoming useless bits.