On the flip side, most applications now are supporting OpenDocument formats and can interoperate easily with one another, not locking you to one office suite vendor. So now even if you are using a Microsoft product, you STILL have to deal with the issue of conversion! And of course, this only happens when you're dealing with such a closed file-format like those of the MS Office suites (which I believe is the only way MS were able to obtain and maintain such a large user base on Office).īTW, the issue is the same for older MS Office users and MS Office 2007 users since Office 20o7 on Windows uses. The conversion excuse given by critics of free and open source apps is a weak one because then the same issue would come up with pay applications like iWork '08 and other commercial non-MS suites (you still have to convert the file even though you paid for the non-MS suite). I also work in education and for the most part, unless the file has some special function that is proprietary to that suite, the conversion has been pretty good. I've been using OpenOffice and NeoOffice for years now, and OpenOffice 2.3 is a big improvement.
