Office applications Toolkit

Story: Office 12 to 'bring XML to the masses'

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You are and engineering company that issues some important specification to critical equipment in Word. Somebody in your IT department upgrades your version of Word. Fine, you think, until your supplier cannot read your document because they are using a older version of word.

I now get the feeling that many companies are going to find that Microsoft's history on not quite being 100% with open standards is going to backfire sooner rather than later, especially as they have a history of not getting it right with backward compatibility with their own software. The problem is this, many alternatives to Word have built in PDF generation facilities, and nearly everybody has a PDF reader of some kind installed on their PC. Since few companies use the extra features that Microsoft have introduced since Word 97, then there is the good possibility that more companies with question why they should upgrade to the latest version of Office.

Not everybody is a Supergeeky programmer, that is looking for solutions to problems they didn't even know existed.

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