TITLE: Open File Formats Only, Please
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 29, 2005 2:12 PM
DESC: Battling the standardization on Microsoft Office in the university bureaucracy...
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BODY:
After being informed repeatedly that I will need
either a Windows box or Office for the Mac in
order to be a department head, due to the sheer
volume of Word and Excel documents that flow through
the university hierarchy, I found hope
this piece of news.
If Norway can do it, why not the State of Iowa or
my university?
I once read a letter to the editor of our local paper
calling for the state to adopt an open-formats-only
policy, as a matter of fairness to competing businesses
and to citizens. Alas, the benefits of standardization
far outweigh the long-term economic effects for most
people. Philosophical issues rarely enter the discussion
at all. I suspect that it's easier for this sort of
edict to originate at the top of a heap, because then
groups lower in the hierarchy face a consideration that
trumps standardization.
In any case, I think that I will get by just fine, at
least for now. I could use
OpenOffice,
if I feel like running X-windows. But my preferred
tool these days is
NeoOffice/J,
which is getting more solid with every release. (It's
finally out of beta.) While it's not a native OS X
app -- it looks and feels like a Windows port -- it
does all I need right now for handling files in Office
formats.
I have spent many, many years of gently encouraging
department heads not to send me Word files, offering
alternatives that were as effortless as possible.
I'm not sure if I'm ready to take on higher levels
of university administration. But I do feel some
obligation to
lead by teaching
on the issue of open standards in computing.
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