Things have changed a little bit since then. Now all the computers I have access to run Linux. But the *need* for Word documents has not completely gone away. Please don't misunderstand me. I am all for open document formats. In fact, I use them whenever I can. However, when a document is being sent to another party who insists on using Microsoft Word format documents and nothing else (not even Adobe PDF), things begin to get annoying. Free tools like AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer are very good substitutes for MS Word and I often get away with generating documents using one of them. The problem arises when I have to edit and return a document that has already been created with the latest version of MS Word. No matter how good AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer are, and believe me they are quite good with a lot of development effort behind them, they are still not (in my humble opinion) 100% compatible with MS Word. I have come to realize this the hard way when a couple of documents generated using MS Word, possibly the latest flavor, have not come out as expected once they were edited using either of these tools.
The article We Can Put an End to Word Attachments by Richard Stallman explains some of the problems behind widespread use of closed and restrictive file formats such as MS Word, and what we can do to limit their influence on our everyday electronic document interchanges.
Links
- We Can Put an End to Word Attachments by Richard M. Stallman
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html - Richard M. Stallman
http://www.stallman.org/ - OpenOffice Writer (Windows 98 - Visa, GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X*)
http://www.openoffice.org/ - OpenDocument format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office - AbiWord (Windows 95b - Vista, GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
http://www.abisource.com/
