The return of Citizens Against Government Waste

The return of Citizens Against Government Waste

Posted Sep 21, 2005 19:44 UTC (Wed) by jonth (subscriber, #4008)
Parent article: The return of Citizens Against Government Waste

'It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies' Fair enough: so stop using Office! I can't think of a better way of locking yourself into one office suite than using Office.

For example, my sister helps out with her church's accounts. She's a Windows user, and has Office installed on her home PC, so she duly set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of things, which she then emailed to her Church. Unfortunately, her church only had Works on their PC, and despite everything she tried, she could not get Works and Excel to talk. That's right, two proprietary products from the same company which do the same thing, can't talk to each other. How stupid/mean can you get? (Hilariously, Microsoft's own advice for this is to use a DBase format to exchange documents.)

She was all ready to tell her church to buy the cheapo version of Office, but just before she did, she asked me if there was a way to do what she wanted. Half an hour later, we'd downloaded and installed OpenOffice, read in the old Excel spreadsheet, saved it as a .sxc file and emailed it to her church. Half an hour more at church to install at the other end; job done. Hopefully, that's one less victim of a proprietary format lock-in...

Jonth

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