Reinventing the office suite

Vikingod · Sep 14, 2005, 01:58 PM

The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is.

Today that means e-mail, and the majority of office documents I receive as attachments in e-mail are absurdly gratuitous. Word documents that substitute for plain text e-mail bodies are rarely formatted in ways that couldn’t be accomplished in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, or even using simple ASCII conventions. If the document includes tabular data, it usually arrives in Excel format.
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Read More / Source: InfoWorld

Sep 14, 2005, 01:58 PM	#1
Vikingod Int'l Fish Liaison Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: By the light of lamp I sit and type... Posts: 16,197 Rep Power: 112 System Specs	Reinventing the office suite The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is. Today that means e-mail, and the majority of office documents I receive as attachments in e-mail are absurdly gratuitous. Word documents that substitute for plain text e-mail bodies are rarely formatted in ways that couldn’t be accomplished in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, or even using simple ASCII conventions. If the document includes tabular data, it usually arrives in Excel format. __________ Read More / Source: InfoWorld