Ubuntu on my new Laptop
I decided to forgo the obligatory Windows install disk for my new laptop and stick Ubuntu on it, much like my last one.
Thought I'd give a quick rundown about my experience.
Jun
24
2005
24
2005
Jun
24
2005
24
2005
Thank you OpenOffice!
I'm a technical reviewer for a book, and have just received a new chapter to review. Written in Word, it was unopenable by my version. Word crashed and the chapter seemed unrecoverable. I sent one quick email to the publisher and in the meantime fired it up on my Linux laptop. Yay!
OpenOffice opened it without any problems whatsoever. Must make mental note to recommend it to anyone who's got corrupted Word Documents in future.
Jun
02
2005
02
2005
Office 12 to have XML
Microsoft are basing their Office 12 file formats on XML. Judging by the white papers surrounding the documents it looks as if they're doing it properly, with document structure/markup being in one section, with references out to binary sections for OLE objects, media etc.Hopefully this'll keep the Slashdot crowd happy, as they assumed that all Microsoft would do would be to put a couple of xml tags around binary data 
The files are going to be renamed zipfiles so you'll be able to view them 'raw' by changing the filename back to zip and viewing them in your favourite zip viewer.
They're going to back-port the format to all office products from 2000
onwards, so bad news for Office 97 users. Hopefully this'll be good
news for OpenOffice.org users who should hopefully get support
reasonably quickly, and anyone using Office 97 not wanting to upgrade
could migrate to OOo instead.
At the moment my only concerns are with licensing – it's a free license to read and write the files, but with anything like this, I wonder if there's going to be changes further down the line – get the format out and widely distributed before imposing restrictions.
High Level Information::http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/2/9/c2935f83-1a10-4e4a-a137-c1db829637f5/Office12NewFileFormatsWP.doc
Developer Info:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/2/9/c2935f83-1a10-4e4a-a137-c1db829637f5/Office12FileFormatDevPreviewWP.doc
