Massachusetts Dumps Microsoft Office
Here’s an interesting bit of news. The state of Massachusetts has decided to completely stop using Microsoft Office products for all of its official documents. The story is also available at pcworld.com. From the former forbes article:
The state of Massachusetts is proposing to make all its workers stop using Microsoft’s Word, Excel and other desktop software applications and switch to open source software, said the Financial Times. In its online edition, the newspaper reported that the US state said yesterday that at the beginning of 2007 it is planning to order all state employees to create and save documents using only open format software.
This is definitely an intriguing move. Personally, I haven’t used Microsoft Word in a long, long time. Having thus far developed my skills in the academic world, most of my documents these days are built with the ever so geeky LaTex. I do think that Excel and Powerpoint are quality applications, but at the same time, OpenOffice offers very similar applications with many of the same features and functionality. OpenOffice is of course free; Microsoft Office we all know is definitely not.
However, regardless of whether you are inclined to pay a lot of money for an application suite, or use a very very similar one for free, I think the main problem that plagues the Office-centric business world is not what software people use to create their documents, it’s what formats they use to distribute them. For example, let’s say I’m looking to buy something – it doesn’t matter what it is – from some company. So I express interest, let them know what I’m looking for and they send me a quote for this product. If you’re this company, please please please don’t send me a Microsoft Word document, or even an OpenOffice document for that matter. If all I want to do is open and read your quote, why on Earth would I want to start a full fledged document editing/writing/creating application if all I want to do is view it? Documents that are meant for viewing should be sent in viewable-only formats (such as the de facto standard PDF). This way, I can open a much smaller and simpler document viewing application rather than the cockpit-of-a-747 Microsoft Word.
I think Massachusetts is on the right track by mandating a switch to only open formats. However, I’ve see it all too often in the business world where people send Microsoft Word documents all over the place and their only purpose is for the receivers to open them up and look at them. Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or any other office suite should be used for the creation of content only. The distribution of this content should be done in open, view-only formats such as PDF. Of course now we run into the problem that most people have no idea how to convert a Microsoft Office document into PDF. Uggh.
September 3rd, 2005 at 11:12 am
For years WordPerfect has had the ability to save direct to a PDF. I don’t know if Word can do that even now. Excel is a puny application when compared with Quattro Pro. And if you want to just read a Word document, there is always WordViewer which is (incredibly) free. I applaud the State of Massachusetts’ decision and just hope that OpenOffice has advanced to a higher level of usability and reliability than it demonstrated when the company I was working for a few years back switched to it. In desperation, I bought my entire department cheap copies of WordPerfect…
September 4th, 2005 at 12:20 am
Yeah Word definitely doesn’t have the built in option to save to PDF. The easiest way to do it is to install a PS capable printer, print out to a PS file and then convert the PS file to a PDF. (I think Adobe actually has some kind of print tool that will bypass the PS file for you). In any case it’s not quite trivial. I actually don’t think I’ve ever used WordPerfect but you’ve already mentioned it a couple times so I don’t doubt it’s quality.
That’s the whole point I guess. People should be able to use whatever application they please to create a document but sharing it should be done using an open, view-only format. And oh I actually had never heard of WordViewer. I will definitely have to check that out.