On 5/08/2010 9:29 PM, Philippe Chaperon wrote: > For all the bad things one can say about Microsoft, I still do not know > of any software package that will match the ability of MS Office to open > very, very old documents. I can be proved wrong, but all my old > documents except MS Office's ones, are now unreadable. To illustrate, I > have been reading Word and Excel documents dating back to prior to 1996 > complete with VBAs and Macros without the slightest problem. By the way > those documents were stored on ... diskettes, yes those little floppies > which the new generation of Mac users would probably not even have seen. > > In my view MS is not all that 'evil' and I must give them credit for > their continued progress specially with Excel, which in my personal > opinion, has no equal. > > Kind regards, > > Philippe C
Of course the reason it's good at opening Microsoft documents is that they're in proprietary Microsoft formats. Using open document formats (such as the native formats of OpenOffice and NeoOffice) means there will be more apps that can read old documents and helps greatly with information preservation, and market competition over time. Not to mention you (and your government tax dollars) won't have to pay money to Microsoft for the licensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption Have fun, Shay -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
