O n Thu, 2011-06-09 at 14:44 +0100, Avi Greenbury wrote: > And here's the problem. odf is the better format, MS Office is the > better office suite. > > I'm not at all convinced that the traction against OOo/LO is entirely > (or even mostly) down to people being used to MS Office and, much as > it > might well be getting better in LO, MS Office has long been the more > complete, polished, stable and predictable of the two.
For the majority of people doing mundane office tasks as I do whilst running my business I doubt there would be a substantial difference using Libre/Open Office or MS Office MS Office may be better - I can't comment as I genuinely have never used it - I started with Lotus (because that was on the first machine I had) then switched to open source programs and finally made the move over to Ubuntu as an OS - my business has been running on Ubuntu for several years now. And that is the point - people use MS office because it's what is on their machines when they buy them and get used to using it. Most people don't want to change - I was interested in open source for a range of reasons and enjoy experimenting with programs but I know most people find it very boring. Because M$ have a monopoly the open source office programs are ham strung as they have to play catch-up trying to get their programs working easily with the closed M$ formats - which their users will need the programs to do as they will daily deal with others using MS office. If the open doc formats were enforced by govt - it would help to level the playing field and it would be easier for larger organisations to start a switch to open source in front offices. I'm sure you all know the arguments That's why getting schools to teach about Open Source and explore the alternatives is very important - then we may not need to 'convert' users. Sarah -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
