A few days ago, Mark Pilgrim blogged about the interoperability of OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. He applauded OpenOffice for being able to open a PowerPoint document that could not be opened in its native application.
While I’ve heard many such stories, I’ve had the unfortunate luck of always being stuck in the position where OpenOffice will NOT open a Microsoft Office document, with the exception of the simplest memos. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, the document will open, but it’ll be rendered illegibly.
It just might be me, or it just might be the people that insist upon sending me documents in proprietary, closed, formats, but, even then, I have two other complaints about OpenOffice: it’s bloated and organized in an awkward matter. I’m sure most users would agree with me on the first complaint. In comparison to other Linux programs (AbiWord, anyone?), OpenOffice takes an incredibly long time to load and, once loaded, it makes my system sluggish. As to the second complaint, it’s a matter of preference. You can call me evil, but I’m used to the Microsoft way (as are most computer users). It would be nice if the developers of OpenOffice took that into account when designing their UI.
On a more important note, though, I believe that documents meant for distribution should not be provided in application-specific formats. I’m tired of having to install numerous applications just so that I can open documents when they are sent to me; I have utter hatred for viewers. In my opinion, documents meant for distribution should be provided as a PDF or as a Postscript file. These two formats are open and highly extensible, and their appearance is usually independent of platform, thus establishing consistency.
Of course, if you want recipients to be able to edit the files, that’s an entirely different issue…
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