AA (in NZ) dumps Open Office, buys Microsoft for ‘compatibility’

This is unfortunately the truth. Microsoft Office is still ‘the standard’ which makes switching to Open Office for a Business full of potential issues. I have found this myself - as long as you are producing your own documents and exporting as PDF, there are no problems. But as soon as you need to colaborate with other Microsoft Office users on the same document, Open Office is simply not yet 100% compatible - particularly around formating.

“The first (issue), with Open Office, is compatibility — sharing information with Microsoft products, both within the organisation and with external parties. A dual world is complicated and, whether people like it or not, Microsoft is a standard.”

See the full article by Randal Jackson here. Another artcile by Rob O’Neill along with similar lines is here. OpenSource is great… but then sometimes it just isn’t.