turgid's Journal: Sun's ODF Plugin for MS Word

Sun recently released a free-as-in-beer plugin for microsoft Word which allows it to read and write (and therefore edit) .odf documents.

So, not only can OpenOffice.org read and write MS Word documents, but now those using Word can do the converse.

In my experience, I haven't had any trouble using OOo to interact with colleagues (OK, PHBs) using Microsoft tools and, in fact, I have often "fixed" .xls and .doc files by loading and saving them in OOo which were causing the Microsoft applications to crash.

I haven't "done" Microsoft at home since 1997, and not at work since 2000, so can any of you tell me whether this Sun plugin is any good? Bill and Steve are not getting another penny out of me, and I am too anally-retentive to "pirate" their software, even although a blind eye is said to be turned to grass-roots use.

No help

[shrykk]

I can't answer your question, but mind if I thread-jack a little and ask you how you've found being microsoft-free?

I'm pretty happy with my current home set-up, a windows laptop that I carry around the house and a Ubuntu box used as a file server, jukebox etc - but I've been wondering about doing without windows at some point as I'm not super-keen to pay the vista tax.

So, is there anything you've found impossible? Things that are easier or harder? Things like games are obvious, but have you ever bee

Re:

[turgid]

There's nothing that I've missed or found impossible. Even in the early days of WINE I was able to run Word for Windows 2.0a and Borland Delphi (not that I used either very much at all).

Where I used to work, PCs were DOS with Win 3.11 with WordPerfect 6.x and Lotus 123. They upgraded to NT4 just as support was being withdrawn by MS. The British Public Sector is astounding. I was able to use WordPerfect 8 for Linux to read and write the documents (more reliably). In fact, I was so fed up with the whole lot

Argh! Timewarp!

[turgid]

It's now 1997

No, it's now 2007.