Slashdot Mirror
Australian Govt Re-Kindles Office File Format War
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's peak IT strategy group has issued a cautious updated appraisal of currently available office productivity suite file formats, in what appears to be an attempt to more fully explain its thinking about the merits of open standards such as OpenDocument versus more proprietary file formats promulgated by vendors like Microsoft."
How about the merit of even being able to re-evaluate their choice of file format because they aren't being locked in by their vendor?
I find it interesting that the author of the article states that he'd "... love to see some competition for Microsoft Office arise and challenge Redmond's dominance." yet recommends that the Australian Government "... would be silly to choose any other standard than one supported strongly by Microsoft." How does he expect the competition to occur if every government user (which is a MASSIVE userbase in Australia) doesn't have the option of using alternatives?
I'm finding the argument about:
"... licensing costs - which are not a factor with open source suites such as OpenOffice.org - are only 'a small proportion of overall ICT expenditure'. Any software change is likely to involve significant cost in installation, training and maintenance"
a little confusing considering the statement that several departments were:
"... signalled their intention to eventually migrate to Office 2010 as part of their next upgrade."
As a teacher in an Australian school currently being switched to 2010, I'd say that using Microsoft Office 2010 would involve a HIGHER retraining cost than LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
And I still can't understand why the government didn't decide "Microsoft Office 2010 is the preferred Office Suite AT PRESENT, but files must be saved in OpenDocument Formats."
I would like to know where do you find any word processor, such as Microsoft Word or even Libre Office Writer, to be superior to LaTeX in any aspect. It obviously isn't on the support for math notation, and it isn't on reference management, on colaborative work, on revision control, or on system requirements. It is also not in productivity, both by "advanced" users and specially in newbies.
The only aspect where I see that word processors may appear to be superior is in table formatting and in managing figures. Yet, that apparent superiority doesn't go beyond the discovery that pictures can be dragged and dropped to a document. Once the user is forced to format those objects then all hell breaks loose.
So, exactly where do you see word processors as being always superior to writing LaTeX documents through a text editor?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I think the thing that you're missing is that most normal people can't do these things in Word either. Let's take the cross referencing example. I recently proofread a masters dissertation for a friend who is not a native speaker. She was using Word, and used Word in her day job. Yet all of the references to figures were done by explicitly typing 'See Figure 12'. When I suggested that she might want to add a figure, she said that she didn't want to because she'd have to renumber everything. I was pretty shocked by this, since that's exactly the sort of thing that computers are supposed to do - the boring and repetitive tasks. Surely, I said, Word can do this? Yes, it can, and actually Word's cross-referencing tool is more powerful than LaTeX's one (which is pretty primitive, although there are a few packages that improve it).
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They can do some of it, but when the WP decides that the figure goes on the next page, they won't be able to find out how to tell it not to. When they want a paragraph starting on the next page, not split over two, they'll use returns to add blank lines. When the font used gets changed, they'll be adding another font tag inside a now unused font tag. When they need a contents or index, they'll either type it all out by hand or try the wizard and get an answer they don't like (and therefore go and make one by hand again) because how to get it to do what they WANTED, not what they were given, is not possible for them.
In fact, in all the ways they know how to use Word, they know how to use Tex. And in all the ways they don't know how to use Tex, they don't know how to use Word.
It really depends on what's your definition of "friendly". For example, I see BibTeX as the friendliest bibliography system there is, mainly due to the fact that when you use it you don't even need to be aware you are using it. You just pick your bibliography file and simply reference what you wish to reference. What's unfriendly about the following command?
\cite{some_book}
Managing a BibTeX bibliography is also quite simple and straight-forward. A user only needs to open a text file with a text editor and add an entry to a book. What's unfriendly about the following entry?
@Book{some_book,
AUTHOR = {The author's name},
TITLE = {the title of the book},
PUBLISHER = {The publisher's name},
YEAR = {some year},
isbn = {a ISBN reference},
}
If we compare using BibTeX with the god-awful way Microsoft Word handles bibliographies we lose any reason to claim that word processors are somehow better at its job than LaTeX. So, why do some people keep parrotting that word processors such as Microsoft Word are somehow better at producing documents than LaTeX? This sort of claim simply goes against reality.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.