Richard Chang wrote: the author of that article has got a rather one-sided view i quote below from the article : " Yes, OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a huge improvement over 1.x in terms of being able to import Microsoft Office files. But what about portability in the other direction? Take in any foreign Office document of relative complexity in Word or Powerpoint format," my reply in short ... ever tried to hit a moving target? Trying to make open-office write properly to a closed source format is definetly not very high on the list of things to do (and _should_ not be) to makee matters worse, the view are based on OpenOffice2 which is still _beta_ and that is not mentioned anyware in the article. there are international standards for data- exchange, M$ is NOT of them, nor do they make a decent attempt to support them. while agreed it makes it difficult to migrate end-users, the goal of migration should also encompass enducating organisations to use the proper standards. This has been the problem all along and it is not going to go away anytime soon. Read the article closely and one thing will strike you, all the problems are related to making linux behave and co-operate with windows. (need i say more?) I fail to understand how linux gets the blame for M$ failing to co-operate. let M$ release the info reqd. and all these issues will go away. But then again this will be the never-ending debate :-) { ...please lets not turn this thread into another philosophy debate.. i only replied b/c i felt a few imp. details were left out in the article. End this thread _here_ } regards Erle