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Aussie Government Proposes OpenDocument As the Standard Format
Bismillah writes "The Australian government chief technical officer wants some views on proposals for the official standard operating environment, which features OpenDocument as the proposed document format. Otherwise, the Aussie government is pretty much a Microsoft shop, with Windows 7 x64 and IE10 as the standard platform. 'Interoperability and support for several versions of Microsoft Office is cited by the AGCTO as reasons to go with ODF, along with flexibility and the fact that the format is continously updated and developed. Spreadsheet formulae are now included in the ODF 1.2 specification as well and the AGTO believes that this, along with Microsoft Office 2013 supporting the format, will help to reliably transfer formulae between applications.' According to the CTO's call for opinions, 'Standardizing on a format supported by a wide range of office suites provides for the greatest possible degree of interoperability without mandating the use of a specific product, as well as providing the best basis for reliable interchange of information between agencies deploying differing office productivity suites.'"
The price of software in Australia is ridiculous and they can't justify it.
"Microsoft Office Professional 2013 costs $599 in Australia and $US399.99 ($A383.54) in the US"
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/evasive-microsoft-adobe-fail-to-justify-prices-20130322-2gjkr.html
Not free copies, a big discount on their network license. When ODF was being "looked at" in several European governments said governments got HUGE discounts on their license renewal. It's a great strategy to save money even if you have no intention of switching.
Yeah, I don't use office stuff that much at home. But last week I went to use LibreOffice for the first time in a couple months, and it crashed halfway thought the second page. It was version 3.6 or something like that. I've upgraded to 4 and and haven't had any problems, but I haven't really used it that much either. I got annoyed at the crash so I tried out Google Docs, and can't understand why anybody would want to use that over LibreOffice, let alone MS Office. You can't even create your own custom styles. Closest you can get is reconfiguring one of the premade "Header" styles. I understand why so many people don't want to give up MS Office, and it's not just because they refuse to give anything else a chance.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
'Erm', I would hope you understand the difference between a document and an application, if you worked in R&D for the Australian Government. Forcing the use of an accessible document format to ensure all commercial and free applications can access that document free of government enforced fees and charges to a private entity ensures adherence to the countries competitive trading laws. Prior to this, playing the, 'tee hee we're just a bunch of dumb fuck ups', might have sort of worked, but continuing to play that card just makes them look permanently like a bunch of 'dumb fuck ups'.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Been using MS office for years, never had much trouble with it, apart from weird formatting issues that we all know about, (try copying & pasting between Word and PPT, for example).
Same with Open/Libre Office. Never had any stability problems, and in one notable case, was able to open a 'critical' word document for a customer in OO when the various versions of MS could not. Strange.
As for Google docs, yup, until it matures, and maybe is better linked to stand-alone apps, (not everyone has permanent access to the internet), is not likely to satisfy power users.
But that's missing the point - O/L Office and/or Google docs are more than enough for most users - and anyway the point here is about the document format, not the applications(s). One of the problems most of the people here report is the inability of O/L Office to satisfactorily read the formatting of MS Office docs, (hardly surprising; it's a nightmare). But again, for most users, is all that weird formatting and animation really needed?
Forcing a single, truly interoperable document format standard accross Govt. sounds a great idea to me.