Office pro plus 2007 £51.00, Vista Ultimate £66.51 .......and more

gromituk

gjchester wrote: »

So ditching the proprietry closed DOC/XLS format and moving to a open XML format is a bad thing?

I am afraid you are sorely mistaken and have fallen for Microsoft's deliberate misuse of XML in an attempt to convince you that it is "open". XML is just a way of expressing data; if this data contains undocumented things like "binary blobs" and "AutoSpaceLikeWord95" directives (not to mention a whole lot of inconsistencies and contradictions) then it is no better than a binary format. And Microsoft's XML formats are full of these things.

now documents are more likely to be readable with the correct formatting in any comparable application (ie open office) rather than .doc where occasionally they get the formatting wrecked opening in them in any other package

Unfortunately that is not only untrue from a technical perspective, but it is even worse - it is a legal problem, too. This is because while there is nothing illegal about reverse-engineering the current document formats to use them in OpenOffice etc, MS has made sure it has crippled the new formats with patents and licensing restrictions so that it can sue anybody else who tries to support it!

So, use Office 2007 and your data is owned by Microsoft. Use OpenOffice (ODF, an ISO standard) and your data will be readable by you, forever. I strongly recommend you save all your documents in the older formats while you still can. Otherwise, you will find one day that you become ransomed to Microsoft's strategy of planned obsolescence. Remember that you want a capable word processor, like the one you had before; Microsoft must keep selling you more and more word processors for it to survive.

Martini

jmarko wrote: »

Open Office is free. You can save things in .doc format. It looks just like the full price brands. It works on all operating systems and it works very well too!

www.openoffice.org

:money:

jmarko

As mentioned earlier OPEN OFFICE is free!
Why spend £130 or even £30 on the Microsoft version when this FREE version will do the job! It also does it very well. Try it. What have you got to lose.

gromituk

And if you don't like that, IBM's comprehensive Lotus Symphony is now free, too! It too uses ODF - in fact everyone and their mother uses ODF, except Microsoft. Think about it...

rocking_horse

Paulina_Fortune wrote: »

Could someone point me in the right direction.

I have a laptop at home that has Windows Vista, and do not currently have windows Office installed on it.

In work, we have Windows XP. I need to find a way to update Windows XP word documents that I send to myself via e:mail to my laptop, and then be able to send them back to work and still be able to update them at work on XP.

What is the best thing to buy for my Laptop, that will achieve this? I think that Windows Office 2007 will not allow me to see the document when I send it back to work.

Help please.

Paulina.

I use open office with Vista at home and a version of MS at work,not sure which one but they work together OK. Down load Open Office for free, try it and if it aint any good dump it. Open office spreadsheet works ok with documents I produced with Excel(no idea what version)

Horlock

Help

Did anyone else order vista ultimate using this deal.

I did and I've only received the 32 bit edition. Now I don't know what to do. Nor do microsoft. Nor do RM.

Any advice