Dec 06
Open Office 2.0, Open Document Format, and Govt. of Massachusetts
I’ve downloaded OpenOffice 2.0 to try it out. So far I’m very happy with it. My only gripe is that the default bullets in Writer still look big and blobby, I need to look for a way to set the default to be something more sensible (not sure if that’s possible).
Bruce Eckel has already been putting it through it’s paces by testing it with his famous Java books: OpenOffice 2.0 passes the first trial-by-fire. He seems very impressed. His original Word doc was 10MB, when saved in Open Doc Format it came out as 1.6 MB!
It certainly is interesting news about the Govt. of Massachusetts choosing to standardise around the Open Document Format specification which is now the default format in OpenOffice 2.0 rather than go with Microsoft’s supposed “open” XML format.
Here’s an interesting article I found which explores the reasons why the Massachusetts government may have made their decision: Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t).