OT: Massachusetts Verdict: MS Office Formats Out

[Guy Fraser]

On Fri, 2005-30-09 at 12:52 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> 
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> > On 29 Sep 2005 at 15:22, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
> >>I started to reply to his message, but you said it soooo much better!
> >>
> >>Why should I follow around after OO when I can just boot Windows in
> >>about a minute and a half, and be assured that the doc is ok? If OO
> >>knows there is a problem, then it should tell me. If there is no
> >>problem, it shouldn't frighten me. If it doesn't know, then why should
> >>I use it?
> >>
> >>Mike
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > But I've seen the problem with documents being different if it is sent 
> > to someone also using MicroSoft, but having a different printer or 
> > fonts. It doesn't print the same. We use to make forms available in 
> > Word format, but they would print differently on different system, 
> > with different page breaks. PDF files worked with all printers. The 
> > only problem was that users couldn't edit the forms, but that wasn't a 
> > big issue in our case.
> 
> This is a different topic, seems to me. PDF is intended to solve a
> different problem, that of printing documents, not editing them.
> 
Although most of the discussion has been about editing documents,
the actual legislation is more about the storage, retrieval and 
display of documents not necessarily the editing of the documents. 
However a vendor that can create and edit documents as well as 
store, retrieve and display them will have a big advantage over 
those that can't.

Massachusetts did not adopt the OO format, the adopted the 
Open Document Format, which OO has also adopted support for 
also.