branhow.com- a look into my world

First off I’d like to say, no this entry is not about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. That was like ages ago! Today the Format Wars pertain to something that everyone probably has gone through at least once in their lives, not being able to open a .doc file in anything except Microsoft Word! I believe that the business community has fallen into the trap of thinking everyone has Microsoft Word or Office. If we look at the web, the two primary formats that I see for documents are either Microsoft’s .doc format or Adobe’s .pdf format. Isn’t there some kind of standard that everyone can read? Well for the moment the .pdf(portable document format) is probably the best at delivering information. But Microsoft has all been about their proprietary format which is the .doc file. That has been one of the major selling points of Microsoft Office and in order for them to stay on top of their game Microsoft recently changed their format to .docx in Office 2007. There are convertors that can read this format for older versions of Word or other word processors, but if you do not have one of these convertors, you’re out of luck. Well recently there has been a large amount of interest in coming to one standard format. So as of the next version of Microsoft Office they will be releasing it with .odf, which was first introduced by the open source community. .odf actually stands for open document format (at least that’s what I believe). One of the major points is that by default it will write your documents as an .odf file. I think this is a very wise decision, because not everyone wants to shell out $150-$300 for Microsoft Office. So praise God for the open source community!