It has been said, in jest and in half-jest, and in jest-but-not-really-jest, that interoperability
means works with Microsoft
. Today I had the pleasure of actually using, instead of simply installing and forgetting about, OpenOffice.org, specifically the part of it that clones Powerpoint and lets you create and edit presentations, and I can attest that interoperability is alive and well.
On a side note, I have never particularly enjoyed creating presentations. There is a zen to it which I am not one with. I am convinced that too much time spent in Powerpoint (or its open source clones) will forever alter the way you think. Others have made this point, but it is not the point I wish to make today.
So anyway, what happened was, my manager sent me a Powerpoint presentation, in which I was to modify one slide and send it back to him. This is what passes for version control in monolithic, bloated, binary document formats. But again I digress. The problem immediately arose that I could not open it in Powerpoint; it gave an error unable to recognize this type of presentation
, or similar. Tried it in OpenOffice.org, it opened right up. Fine, whatever. Did my thing, saved as .ppt, got out as quickly as possible.
Leery of OpenOffice.org’s interoperability, I tried again to open the resaved version in Powerpoint. Still no go. I deleted all slides but mine and saved again, but Powerpoint continued to give me the same error. I emailed my manager the single slide anyway, and told him to let me know immediately if he had any problems with it. I got a response saying thanks, all is well.
Keep in mind that we are almost certainly using identical versions of Powerpoint, since we have a standard corporate installer for it. There is a remote possibility that he is using Powerpoint 2000 and I am using Powerpoint XP, but that doesn’t really weaken my point, which is this:
OpenOffice.org interoperates with Microsoft Office better than Microsoft Office interoperates with itself.
Newsflash: I’ve become one of those annoying OpenOffice.org fanatics. Who couldn’t have seen that coming? I mean, really. Tomorrow maybe I’ll talk about how OpenOffice.org is an end user application with a decent UI, yet is open source. But how can that be? I hear you cry. Must. control. cognitive dissonance.
To sum up:
works with Microsoft
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim