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by smt88
793 days ago
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Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list. Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them. They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design). There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. Proprietary formats are a problem, but not with Microsoft Office anymore. We should all be a lot more annoyed by PDFs, honestly. |
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From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably.
As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.