Explaining Open Standards email attachements

[David Gerard]

On 3 April 2010 14:22, Michel Roche <listes.pichel at free.fr> wrote:
> Le 02/04/2010 05:51, Theo Schmidt a écrit :

>> With DOCX I'm uncertain what do do now that OpenOffice can open these files.
>> When somebody sends me one I somtimes pretend I still can't open it and ask for
>> a PDF, RTF or even (Horror!) DOC. I generally explain that DOCX is a bad idea
>> because the majority of people can't open it, i.e. everybody who hasn't got an
>> up-to-date program or plugin. I expect this actually includes more Windows-users
>> than Linux-users.

> The point in docX is that actually OpenOffice (>3.x) users can perfectly
> handle them (at least for quite simple documents that represent, say,
> 99% of the production) whereas users of somewhat old versons of MS
> Office cannot read them.
> At this peculiar time, it's a very good help making users migrate or at
> least install OpenOffice :-)
> So despite the fact tha docX *is a bad idea*, it's inherent lack of
> backward compatibility helps a lot Free Software in some cases :-)))


Heh. That's a reason to send people .docx then ;-)


- d.