On Fri, 20 May 2011 09:40:31 +0100 Sarah Chard wrote: > > On Fri, 2011-05-20 at 08:18 +0100, Alan Lord (News) wrote: > > On 20/05/11 00:01, Daniel Case wrote: > > > know, apparently I was wasting time..) so the question is how can > > > I educate these people, especially if they are willing to cancel a > > > project over it? (I make my income from this stuff!) > > > > LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org will open most MS docs without > > complaint > > or issue. > > I'm really not sure what the issue is here? > > Al > > ---------------- > > I run my own business and can open the majority of documents I get > sent using open/libre office, I send most of my business documents > as .pdf, knowing that everyone will be able to view and print them. > I rarely mention the fact that i run my business on open source - I am > not in the IT world and the majority of people i deal with would not > understand / are not interested in document formats - the only time it > ever comes up is when clients tell me about problems they are having > with their windows systems - at which point I tell them I run Ubuntu > and how stable it is! > If you want to 'educate people' without causing problems with your > business add a very short message to your signature saying that you > prefer to use .odf with a link to site that gives a good explanation > of what this is - and send relevant docs in both the closed M$ and > in .odf formats when appropriate - give them a choice but don't make > it hard for them to deal with you > > Sarah
With a previous employer (a good few years ago now) I pointed out to various more-technically-included colleages (IT lecturers, as I am myself) that there was no need for them to be sending me documents in Microsoft's proprietary formats when there was little (if any) formatting involved - plain ol' text files would suffice. I explained that it was sometimes awkward for me to open said documents. Their responses "tough". So I proceeded to send them any and all word processed documents in .sxw files. They complained that they couldn't open the files I had sent them. My response, with tongue firmly in cheek, was "tough". Thankfully they saw the funny side of it and relented. Grant. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
