[ubuntu-uk] Microsoft proprietary file types?

[Grant Sewell]

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.