Re: accessible streaming

>   The OpenOffice suit *can* open MS Office documents. However, it can't
>   open *all* Word documents. It can also write Word documents, but MS

In particular, any attempt that it makes to open documents from 
recent versions of MS Word can only be based on black box reverse
engineering as, whilst the specifications for the Word file formats
are available to download, they are only provided on the strict 
condition that they not be used to produce programs that are for
non-Windows systems or which compete with MS Office on Windows.

>   It's a bit of a mess, really. I've had clients who could not open
>   their one month old Word documents with a new version of Word.

There are normally forwards and backwards convertors, but, for example
when I get a Word 2000 document from the marketing department, it 
won't open embedded in IE and it won't open when double clicked in
Explorer, but it will open if opened from the File | Open menu in
Word.

Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 17:07:32 UTC