Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

re: Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

anonymous — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:46:35 GMT

I feel completely cheated by the purchase of a current shipping modern Microsoft product i.e. Office 2007. I hate Microsoft for not supporting ISO 29500 in Office 2007 and making us upgrade to a newer version of Office. I sincerely wish there will an overwhelming outcry now regarding this and Microsoft will reconsider its decision.

re: Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

Matthew Hardman — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:16:30 GMT

One of the things you need to understand is that while implementing support for a new file format such as ODF is substantial work, changes to existing formats can often be more complex because we need to maintain backwards compatability between the two formats.

Also you should consider this about your purchase of Office 2007, while having a document standard incorporated is important, was it your primary driver for acquisition. Consider the other benefits that you get from using Office 2007... productivity improvements, creativtiy enhancements. Consider the different ways that you can utilize Office in your workplace today, you can use Office as a front end to your business applications like SAP, Siebel, in fact almost anything because Office can be used as a development platform. You can use Excel for instance as an analytical tool against databases. I have built these myself for analysts to monitor pricing in the market every 5 seconds, it was really cool, and I did that in Excel 95!!!

There are so many other reasons why you would buy Office 2007 besides a document standard, and I would encourage you to consider the time savings and productivity enhancements you get out of using the product to deliver value back from your purchase.

re: Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

someone — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:09:04 GMT