Monday May 14, 2007

Locking yourself into OfficeOpenXML and Office 2007 made easy

I just stumbled over this really funny and interesting blog entry:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6183476.html

It's about Office 2007 trial versions, which allow you to store your files only in OOXML, even clipboard exchange with other applications seems to be disabled.

So when the 30 days trial period ends, you have two "choices": Buy Office 2007 for being able to access your own documents, or find some tool for converting your documents from OOXML to some really open document format, like ODF. 

Finding some tool sounds reasonable, but AFAIK there is no final version of any such tool available right now, so you might loose some formatting or even some data!

I especially enjoyed the sentence “Choice is an optional extra, only available after purchase” :)

ODF is supported by different open source and closed source products, for example Sun StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, IBM Notes 8, KOffice, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and many more.

No risk to get locked into software by one particular vendor!

Posted by Malte Timmermann ( May 14 2007, 04:44:51 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]