My email to Microsoft requesting OOo file format support as a standard feature for Word

This is probably not of too much interest to many people, but the use of open file formats is a very big issue to me. I submitted this email by going www.microsoft.com, hitting the 'contact us' link, then selecting the 'suggest new feature for product' choice. If you happen to be one of the small number of people who care about file formats, please send them a message of your own! Here is my email:

Hello, I am an author of 14 published books - many of them written using Word for Windows and for the Mac.

While I basically like the functionality of Word, it would make my life very much easier if Word would also support the (soon to be an international standard) OpenOffice.org XML file format (gzipped XML files in a very clear format).

The problem is that I consider what I write to be **my data** and I would sometimes like to reuse **my data** in other ways. I find the OpenOffice.org file format to be very easy to process using simple programs written in Python, C#, Java, etc.

To repeat myself a little: the value of my word processing documents increases dramatically when I can access **my data** using simple programs.

In recent years, even though I own licenses for Word for Windows 2000 and Microsoft Office for the Mac (excellent!, by the way) I find myself using OpenOffice.org more and more because of the file format issue.

Money for software and writing tools is not an issue with me - I would rather spend money for upgrades for future versions of Word because it is such a polished writing tool. However, without simple and native support for the (soon to be international standard) OpenOffice.org file formats I am unlikely to buy future upgrades.

Thanks for your attention.

-Mark Watson

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more