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Sun Releases ODF plugin for Microsoft Office
Verunks writes "Microsoft Word users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available"
for Office 2007 to come out. I wonder if MS will let this plugin be compatible with 2007 or if they will let Sun work it out for themselves.
je suis parce que j'aime
With the release of this plugin, Sun delivers a real punch to Microsoft's testes.
Hopefully corporate executives and managers take a careful look at this situation. They need to realize what Sun and Microsoft are actually bringing to the table. Sun is bringing openness, compatibility, and portability. On the other hand, Microsoft is bringing proprietaries, incompatibility, and importability. Sun is for what benefits their customers. Microsoft is for what benefits themselves. And I'd rather deal with the vendor who at least partially has my interests in mind. That vendor is thusly not Microsoft.
For better or worse, at least -someone- is trying to make inroads towards interopability/convenience with ODF. As usual with probably-the-best-way-to-go-but-unpopular-since-it -isnt-microsoft technologies lately, that someone just happens to be Sun. Again...
is it possible to import ods (Oo,kspread) based spreadsheets into MS Excel as well?
i hate having to fire up O.o just to convert the ods spreadsheet i created in kspread, sorry Sun
guys kspread is just more responsive and faster to load, to xls files for others to view.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Why does it want me to register?
What? Solaris not stable or reliable? I call troll.
Big time troll. We're talking "The Hobbit" troll -- all three of them wrapped up into one with a nice coating of bullsh*t on the outside.
I've been using OpenOffice ever since it was released - on both Solaris and Windows - and I've never had "stability" issues. In fact, I haven't voluntarily used any MS Office product, with the exception of MS Publisher, in years. I've had Solaris boxes that were heavy-use, web development servers with uptimes of more than 13 months, as in 13 months without rebooting but getting heavy development usage every weekday. It's been a long time since I've run into a Sun server that crashed for no apparent reason. Anyone who has seriously worked with Sun hardware and Solaris knows better. This guy probably tried it, had no clue what he was doing, and gave up, or else he tried to run Solaris on some crap x86 hardware that was barely compatible.
Referring to Solaris as "unstable" is like referring to a Mack truck as a "Yugo".
I'd trust a Sun-released version of a Word export filter far, far more than I'd trust Microsoft to release the same because you know that MS would never make it fully compatible in order to protect their monopoly.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Notice I said *PRE* open soucring, and Star Office? I'm perfectly happy with Open Office, except for the rare few occasions it has had trouble with MS Word docs, and I can't blame them for the lack of MS documentation. But Star Office, the version before being open sourced wouldn't last 20 minutes without a crash in Windows or Linux for me.
As for Sun, maybe I just had bad luck, but I had two different situations where I had Solaris servers (various variants of the Sparc processor around 2000-2004, either multi-dev - web, java, C, and one was a mail server) that crashed daily, but the True64 servers didn't crash, and the Windows server normally got at least a week of uptime.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
note: I wasn't the admin of any of those servers, I left that to the professionals in the various places that they were located.
Wanna make any more innacurate assumptions about me and the situation?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Wow. Care to dash your credibility any further? By admitting that you weren't even the admin means that you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
... you are critical of a company for software/hardware that someone else was administering, so who knows how it might have been installed or configured. Additionally, you don't even know the architecture that was being used with a vague statement about a server sometime between 2000-2004. Do you have any idea of how many dozens of different styles of servers that Sun released in that time? Was it even a server that was released in that frame or was it an older box that was still hanging around? You might as well say, "I had reliability problems with a car made by [insert company here] sometime between 2000 and 2004, but I was just a passenger."
So, let me get this straight
And you expect us to take your statements about Solaris/Java/OO with any seriousness? You accuse me of inaccuracy when you yourself have no credible knowledge of the environment that you were criticizing?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Learn to use the right tool for the right job, people!
Wasting a gmail account for that will only end up making all semi-decent accounts unavailable, just like hotmail.
Mailinator is the right tool for that, remember it.
(and don't forget to leave a copy of the account details on bugmenot, too)
GPG 0x1B479C78
Now I can send documents in OpenDocument format to everyone and when they say "hey, I don't know how to open this thing you sent me", I can tell them "well, you can either use OpenOffice or get the converter". ;)
The rest of the conversation would be something like this:
- Hey, but the converter is only available for Office 2003 and 2007, I only have XP and I don't want to spend $100+ on a new version of MS Office!
- Well, you can either buy it or switch to the another Office software, if you want to read the documents I sent you.
- I will not! Why should someone be forced to buy or use something against his will, just to open someone else's documents??
- Exactly...
... http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ ?? It's already out there for a while now!!
Business software isn't the be-all and end-all. As long as there are home/private users there'll be a market for standalone software. Not everyone has internet access; of those who do, most are still on dial-up; and of those who are on broadband, a non-negligible number have bandwidth caps. Standalone software isn't going anywhere.