Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 13:39 GMT
I'm guessing MS must have somehow placated Adobe, who threw a hissy fit when MS tried to provide this support in the original release.
Details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 14:33 GMT
The reason why MS is providing support for ODF now in SP2 is due to the fact that OOXML is now an ISO standard since Nov 08 and one of the reasons why it was previously rejected as a standard was MS Office not supporting the ODF format, I wouldn't be surprised if the support for ODF was part of that deal so it's not entirely true that MS wants to adapt customer needs so it's providing support...it's more like "We were forced to provide support or else we loose our title of OOXML being a standard.
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 14:33 GMT
I certainly hope it has better PDF support than the optional download gave; the PDFs which came out of Word using that were beyond pathetic. Rather than embedding fonts, it would convert them all to *bitmaps* - low quality and large file size. Enable 'PDF/A' mode, it embeds the fonts - but trashes the graphics in the document instead. I suppose it's very slightly better than the total absence of PDF export the previous version of Word offered, but only just!
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 21:08 GMT
26% faster, eh? IIRC, every new version of anything from MS has claimed something similar (even Vista!) and it's never been true. Sclerotic software, anyone?
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 21:08 GMT
26% of shit slow is not really any improvement, I think their programming team really havent a fxcking clue how to make anything, almost everything is BIG and slow and slow, they shouldnt be banking on everyone will buy the latest and most powerful PC just to run their crap software, why dont MS make their programmers test their own software on a basic spec (min spec Vista) machine as advertised and see how fast it works before releasing them, this way, they can see how shit they are with their work.
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 21:08 GMT
The only reason they have included ODF support in SP2 is because they had to, not because of some warm and fuzzy feeling towards their customers, who are leaving in droves at the moment, and at £450 a pop for Office, I'm not surprised. Why would normally rational folk make a conscious decision to spend large amounts of scarce money on a product that provides them with precisely what they can achieve for the majority of the employees with much better value alternatives, such as OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony or iWork for the Mac, all of which had ODF & proprietary file format support from the start.
As MS are being attacked on all fronts at the moment and when your profits mainly come from 2 cash cow's, I'm not entirely surprised that it has taken them a while to provide this, but please don't swallow the line that they are doing this because they want to help you. They really are smiling through gritted teeth with this one.
Posted Wednesday 29th April 2009 21:08 GMT
Why buy this MS Bloatware when you can get OpenOffice for free. Granted, it doesn't actually do what you want it to do, and it is spectacularly bug ridden - but the great thing is that you, the end-user, can help make it better. You just need to dedicate a day each week to collaborative online efforts in bugsquashing and feature improvements and developments. Complete novice to programming? Well, let the online community belittle your pathetic consumerist vision of a product that 'just works' and instead urge you to dedicate your life to improving OO, free of charge - it will heal the world.
Alternatively, pay up and let MS do the hard work whilst you get on with your life.
You mean, you don't know what root privileges are? You idiot! Anyone living in the 21st century needs to know that....
Posted Thursday 30th April 2009 09:06 GMT
"and at £450 a pop for Office, I'm not surprised."
Do you mean home use here or business use, because for home use its about £70-£90 for the home edition.
Or are you just randomly quoting high numbers because for some reason you hate ms?
Did a clown in a microsoft tshirt touch you in the bad place when you were younger?
Posted Thursday 30th April 2009 09:06 GMT
I must congratulate you on your excellent FUD comment.
I use Office 2007 at work - from time to time it crashes or formatting goes wonky.
I use Openoffice.org 3 at home - from time to time it crashes or formatting goes wonky.
Note that the above comments are less vague and hand wavy than yours.
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