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On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 20:47 +0100, Henry Bremridge wrote: > Governments and organisations worldwide are increasingly getting irritated with > this "forced upgrade" and have asked for a standard file format that can be read > with any software. > Insert a line about there being an ISO standard which MS does not support. Instead ... > The latest set of upgrades is moving from Microsoft 97 (doc) to Microsoft 00xml > (docx). Microsofts objective to have docx accepted as a standard file format was > rejected by the ISO on Tuesday. (It was also rejected by the UK Government with a > number of technical issues to be addressed). This despite reported irregularities > that include purchasing of votes in Sweden, admitted by Microsoft; rejection of > Microsoft's competitors in Portugal because of lack of chairs; hijacking of > standardisation committees in many countries, including USA, Italy, Colombia and > Mexico; manipulations of the vote process by presidencies in Switzerland and > Uruguay; replacement of an insufficiently Microsoft-friendly technical committee > by a "more agreeable" one in Poland; non-acceptance of competition in Venezuela > and Ukrania; and more. > As a result the only accepted ISO file format for Office Applications is Oasis - > or odt. > > In practice what does this mean > > - Sending files in a proprietory format (doc, docx) requires recipients to buy > software to read it. This is wrong to student's families who may not be able to > afford legal version of Microsoft software Open Office is the best known free software to send and receive .odt available to all home and school computer systems free of charge which can also read any *.doc file. > - Education is a right: Public data should be accessible to citizens independent > of their income and their physical abilities. > - Docx can be used as a local format within the school: for all communication > outside the school *.doc should be used. where recipients are known to be able to receive it? *.odt could be made available?????? This is a clumsy way of mine to try to resolve the apparent contradiction. Why should .docx be used inside the schools. Surely this means all staff have to adapt together. Is this going to happen? FWIW -- James Kilty http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html