Closed Today, Gone Tomorrow
There’s been a bit of excitement recently about people switching away from Apple (gasp!) and, more generally, of openness. Not of open source, necessarily, but in terms of your data. It is an insidious threat. We don’t have an iTunes Music Store here in New Zealand (or decent broadband, for that matter) but I find the idea of DRM-infected music horrific. It’s selling aplenty, but I’ll be buying CDs, thank you.
I remember back when we first got a Windows (3.11, for Workgroups) PC and it came with Microsoft Works. I made what must have been some stunning achievements in literature, only to discover that the files were not even compatible with freakin’ Word. Likewise for Publisher. I mean, I don’t mind if all of the formatting doesn’t survive the trip, but how about a textbox? I’ve tried viewing the actual source for one of those files before and it is indeed horrific. Now, I still have some files from those days, and they are effectively locked away from me. This is unfortunate, but considering most of the stuff I made then was utter crap, I haven’t got too upset about it. However, it is part of a much larger problem - one I need to start thinking about more seriously before I lose much more.
The basic analogy here is that keeping your data in accessible formats is like backing up your data: it’s the kind of thing you don’t worry about until just after you should have been. Then you worry a whole lot, all at once, and it is about as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. Does your stuff matter to you? My stuff matters to me. I’m worrying.
To follow along with the conversation (the interesting bits, at least), you want to start with Mark Pilgrim’s When the Bough Breaks, advance to John Gruber’s And Oranges, then return to Mark Pilgrim for Juggling oranges. Also have a read of Tim Bray’s Time to Switch? Finish it off with some HahahaLOL. If all that wasn’t enough for you, Joel Spolsky has a completely unrelated but really interesting piece titled My First BillG Review.
The result of it all? Well, Tantek suggests some safe formats. I like to write my docs in XHTML anyway (have I mentioned, Office is shit? [Breaking: Apparently not anymore]). But the main point to take away is that - like backing up - this is something you really ought to give some thought to now. Otherwise in ten years, you’ll be giving it lots of thought - thoughts like damn.
I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on why OpenOffice could be better?
I downloaded 1.1 a couple of weeks ago and it has served fine as an ‘opener of .xls and .doc files’. I had to download the Word Viewer 2003 from Microsoft to make sure it was creating .doc files correctly though.
One thing that annoys the heck out of me is how it keeps asking if I want to save my .xls file in the native OpenOffice spreadsheet format. Every. Time. Where is my ‘No, and remember this choice’ or option to turn off that prompt?
Comment by Dave Underwood — June 26, 2006 @ 5:13 pm
Gold! That annoys me too, and it is a great example of the very worst of the Office experience. Surely, we all learnt from Clippy. Surely.
What pissed me off to begin with was how freaking hard it was just to download the thing. This is what the download experience should be like. Downloading OOo was a horrible journey through questions like “do you want the version with the JRE or without?” and “please provide your details for our spam list.” I think the bastards even asked me to choose a mirror. Utter garbage. This was when I took their thing off my sidebar. The way they treat their users is disgusting.
Heh, so anyway. Here’s one thing they could do to improve the actual product: don’t have a horizontal scroll bar if the page doesn’t scroll sideways. A screaming obvious way to improve on MS Office that they completely missed. I had hoped it would be like Firefox to IE, but sadly it was like Linux to Windows: all the bad bits, not as many good bits, at an extremely attractive price. In case you missed it, I made a few similar notes about The GIMP, et al.
In an attempt at balance, I will say that it is, you know, not awful, and I do still use it (although I’m currently on Office ‘97 at home). It’s really good to have that alternative out there, and even though I don’t sound like it, I really appreciate all the hours people put in to produce this key product. And there are some really nice things - the OpenDocument spreadsheet I saved was only 1/4 the size of it’s Excel counterpart. There are many positives, and I don’t want them to be blackened by my denigration. But the negatives, man, the negatives let it down so bad. It’s the Great Open Source Tragedy.
Comment by db — June 27, 2006 @ 1:08 am
[…] I run this once a week on Sundays. The magic formula with regards to frequency is to think would I be okay with losing all my data since my last backup? If the answer is no, start backing up more often. Oh, and remember to keep your data in accessible formats. […]
Pingback by Simple, Crude Backup Batch Script | db.rambleschmack.net — August 6, 2006 @ 11:32 pm