uh... you've never actually used smart suite have you? WordPro and 123 can both *export* a sizable subset of their features to the coresponding MS formats, but they have the same problem that any open solution will have in terms of reading back MS files. There are a number of things Smart Suite can't handle. Anything with VB Script imbeded in it is a perfect example.
A couple months ago I was asked to review a document produced by someone at a major Linux distro. The file was in MS Excel format. I attempted to open it with all my linux applications... none could handle it, so I rebooted to windows and tried to pull it up in 123... got more of it, but still wasn't able to make sense out of it because the markup that was referenced wasn't present. I finally sent the file home and opened it with an old copy of Excel where I printed it to a postscript file and sent it back to the office, the next day the postscript file was converted to pdf and distributed to the rest of the team.
What we really need to do is just get away from the MS file formats. The document above had no need to be in excell format, it was nothing more than an annotated list, it could have been delivered in any number of formats, not the least of which was plain ascii text (the format I returned the data in).
So why did a open source company use a MS file format to send this data to us? "because it's the industry standard." Screw that. We don't need another format, we need an open standard.
Re:If you build it, they will come (Score:2)
uh... you've never actually used smart suite have you? WordPro and 123 can both *export* a sizable subset of their features to the coresponding MS formats, but they have the same problem that any open solution will have in terms of reading back MS files. There are a number of things Smart Suite can't handle. Anything with VB Script imbeded in it is a perfect example.
A couple months ago I was asked to review a document produced by someone at a major Linux distro. The file was in MS Excel format. I attempted to open it with all my linux applications... none could handle it, so I rebooted to windows and tried to pull it up in 123... got more of it, but still wasn't able to make sense out of it because the markup that was referenced wasn't present. I finally sent the file home and opened it with an old copy of Excel where I printed it to a postscript file and sent it back to the office, the next day the postscript file was converted to pdf and distributed to the rest of the team.
What we really need to do is just get away from the MS file formats. The document above had no need to be in excell format, it was nothing more than an annotated list, it could have been delivered in any number of formats, not the least of which was plain ascii text (the format I returned the data in).
So why did a open source company use a MS file format to send this data to us? "because it's the industry standard." Screw that. We don't need another format, we need an open standard.