Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Kate sent out an email to the teachers attending my Canberra Set Dance Weekend letting them know the final programme. Because she has to work with me on this, and while I can read and write Microsoft Word documents with OpenOffice, the subtle conversions each time cause enough 'format rot' to make Kate concede to using OpenOffice for all documents for the event. She must be too used to it by now, because she sent them all an OpenOffice Writer document.

When I saw this, I opened it and converted it to PDF, and then sent them all a brief email saying "What, Microsoft Word can't read an open, publically available standard document format? How much did you pay for it then? My word processor comes for free, reads and writes Word format as well as a dozen or so others. Try it today!", apologised for my Open Source Zealot Ranting, and attached the PDF. And then snuggled into bed with extra words of love for Kate.

(The first win was when she conceded that Word's habit of 'correcting' anything that looks vaguely like a list into a full-blown styled list without asking you, which OpenOffice only does if you ask it to, was almost enough reason for her to convert over. Almost but not quite. I'll have to find another feature :-)