dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

We Can Put an End to Word Attachments


Some very good reasons not to use Word and send people Word attachments. It would be nice that people start realising that:

  1. Not everyone has MS Office and/or cares about it
  2. Word and such aren't free [lots of people use illegal copies, causing them to think they can get MS Office for nothing, which technically just isn't true]
  3. Every new version of Word is *not* compatible with its predecessors. This forces people to upgrade to that new "really cool and updated" Office version
  4. Lots of those attachments could have been send as plain text [saving lots of space, and better searchable] or PDF
  5. An office suite that *is* free and even Free can be found and downloaded legally here [OpenOffice.org]

Taking into account that OpenOffice.org is even better compatible with the various versions of Word documents than Word itself [I've saved other people's documents various times when Word did crash hard on its own document], it can actually create document larger than 80 pages with illustrations etc without giving one problem [try that with Word] and actually behaves when adding those illustrations and other normal markup to your content, one could wonder why people still use that expensive and huge piece of software.