Author: Paul Stimpson Date: To: Hampshire LUG Mailing List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] OOo 3.1 supports anti-aliasing
Hi,
I'd agree that MS has the same learning curve issues. My customer has licenses for both Office 2003 and Office 2007. I have been told to carry on installing Office 2003 and the XML compatibility pack and forbidden from installing 2007 because the new 2007 UI is unacceptable to the users and they won't do the learning curve.
I installed OOo on my partner's machine and she ended up waiting til I was away and buying MS behind my back. The problem was MS Office file compatibility. She produces a newsletter with people who use MS and won't change. Every time the document was saved as a DOC, edited on MS and then reimported into OOo the tables and page formatting got messed up and she had to lay the whole document out again.
For her OOo was ****. She doesn't care that the problem is MS' fault for not documenting their file format. As a user she saw that if everyone stayed with MS the newsletter workflow worked but if OOo was introduced it caused pain and the cost saving wasn't worth the pain to her. MS rely on this to stop people switching so until the binary file formats are dead and buried (and assuming that Office XML is sufficiently documented to enable true interoperability) I think it will be difficult to get people who exchange documents to switch.
