I find it very poor taste to primarily criticize OpenOffice. You briefly recognize Microsoft's share of the blame in the text, but the headline and emphasis is all on OpenOffice's 'failure'. Responsibility lies with both parties.

please people, don't keep falling for PCWorld's increasingly badly written posts that are based on insufficient research. They are nothing more than link/comment/page-view bait. I know this comment will probably be deleted by them too soon/my account might be deleted, but I feel like I must say this.

On a separate note: the "30k DreamPC" giveaway seems to have been a "bait" too. Why was no winner announced? (>1 month now)

As regards the post, yeah, MS can try to support ODF (another ISO standard) too. etc. etc.

I am withdrawing the grayed out text, congratulations to the guy who won! I was just hoping PC World had atleast made a prominent post that a winner had been selected without giving out the name till the paper-work was done. However, I stand by my statement about the bad quality of recent (past 2-3 months) articles on PC World.

Message was edited by: lituus

That's what beta test periods are for - testing before releasing for public stable consumption - hopefully they can patch up those functions before final release (assuming the XML formats are on the list for planned completion). It's another nice thing about open source development - having no forced "sales-based" release cycle - so if the production team sees your concern as important they can hold off final 3 release.

Does Office support the Open Document Format? It's always been open for them to implement

This article is poorly written and misleading to the audience. It assumes that the Windows XML standard and the OpenOffice standards are the same, when everyone knows they are not. Since MS got away with having their own Open XML standard approved they can choose whether to support other competitors standards or not and most likely they wont. Has the author tried saving a document from Windows ".doc" into Openoffice format? This article won't convince to change or buy a poorly compatible version of MS Office compared to a BETA version of OpenOffice, so I'm sticking with OpenOffice.

Of course it has problems. People nowadays fail to remember that Beta, is Beta! It has bugs, and they are meant to find out. Also, previous versions of office do not natively support Office 2007 formats either. So, I don't blame OO for not supporting it.

Hey guys, I sure hope they can get it working... but when you say "it's a beta, of course it doesn't work," you're falling for a tactic that the proprietary software companies use. They're forced to comply with annual release schedules to meet their revenue projections -- open source projects aren't. To shove OpenOffice 3.0 into beta when one of the most important features clearly doesn't work seems inexcusable. Beta is for testing, not for writing new features. If it can't open a simple document now, how is it going to open a complex business document later? As for whether Microsoft Office supports ODF, no -- Microsoft doesn't support it. But others do -- look for plugins that let Word and Excel read and write ODF-formatted documents at http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Saying that OO 3.0 doesn't have to worry about opening a MS Office 2007 file because MS Office doesn't fully support the standard is ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the corner. The whole basis of the existance of Open Office as a viable alternative to MS Office is that it is fully compatible with MS Office. But, version 2.3 was not. I downloaded it to see how compatible and functional it would be as an alternative.

People who use Office at work would like to be able to avoid purchasing an expensive software package to do work at home. If the document is an Excell file and is password protected, Open Office 2.3 will open the file, but will not save that file back as an .xls document. Fortunately MS themselves have come to the rescue with MS Office 2007 Home & Student. It has the big three - Word, Excell and Powerpoint, for only $122 (from Newegg) and on top of that it's good for use on three machines.

So why worry about downloading OO 3.0 with it's inconsistencies that may mess up an important office document when you can get the real McCoy for about $40 a machine? For those who don't have to worry about excanging critical files with someone using MS Office, OO still remains a viable and very inexpensive alternative. But, it continues to miss it's own stated goal - a seamless alternative to the 800 pound gorilla.

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