Introducing Document Freedom Day

Introducing Document Freedom Day - 26 March

Posted Feb 20, 2008 19:13 UTC (Wed) by kornak (guest, #17589)
Parent article: Introducing Document Freedom Day - 26 March

I've toyed with the idea of including an "odf" document with all the "doc" files I am forced
to send in addition with a simple blurb as to how one might open an ODF document with either a
plugin or native application. I've always thought it to be rather rude to have to be forced to
deal with doc files and now I am getting docx files which is really rude. What would be a good
"sig" example to assist those less enlightened? Perhaps a link to the odf group or a plugin
maker?

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Introducing Document Freedom Day - 26 March

Posted Feb 21, 2008 0:19 UTC (Thu) by xeta7 (guest, #50658) [Link]

I don't know about polite way, but at least
.docx documents can be opened with Novell's OpenOffice Plugin,
adding odf-converter-1.1-7.oxt (current version) to OpenOffice.
But that's only for Word 2007 files, I don't know what to do with
Excel 2007 etc files but to use online converter.

Good idea

Posted Feb 21, 2008 0:58 UTC (Thu) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link]

Good idea, I think you should give people that choice. You'll probably find more people than you expected would like to work with Open Document Format.

It's especially good if you use it as a first-class format, not making lossy conversions to and from the Microsoft formats all the time.

Introducing Document Freedom Day - 26 March

Posted Feb 21, 2008 5:33 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

I find sending a .PDF file and the .ODT source file is sufficient for most tasks. Sending a .PDF is usually a good idea in any case -- there isn't much commonality between out-of-the-box fonts between Windows and Linux so .ODT files often don't render well on other people's machines.

When people want a .DOC file I send the .ODT as well, with a short note explaining that the .DOC file is an export of the .ODT OpenDocument source file.