The World's Most Dangerous Virus

Scary stuff.  A more simple (and perhaps more important) reason not to use Microsoft Office is that by using it, you give up all control of your own data.  MS uses proprietary formats (.doc, .xls, etc) which is a problem for two reasons: 1) only MS Office can understand them (other suites, like StarOffice/OpenOffice, eventually learn to decode the MS formats, but that gets harder with every new release of MS Office), and 2) MS is notorious for altering the formats with new releases of MS Office, thereby forcing users to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade.  Which is nothing but highway robbery -- there are literally zero advances made in the "field" of word processing; there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade a word processor.  Same for spreadsheet apps, etc; any new features are very few and very far between, and are certainly not worth hundreds of dollars.

So once you create a document using an MS Office program, you need that MS Office program (forever) to be able to edit the document.  And that includes spending the hundreds of dollars every 2 years for the upgraded versions.  Which means, as I said, you are no longer in control of your own data; MS effectively controls it.

I haven’t used MS Office in about a year now, and good riddance to it.  On the rare occasion that I need to type something for which a plain text document won’t suffice, I either use HTML, or I use OpenOffice.  This is a free office suite comparable to MS Office, and it can understand (read and write) all the MS Office file formats.  (As MS Office 3 comes out, it may take a while before OpenOffice understands the "new" versions of .doc, .xls, etc.)

So as that article explains, NO ONE should use MS Office.  It is a virus; by using it and spreading documents made by it, you force other people to use it.  Some people (like me) will be willing to say, "You sent me a document in a closed, proprietary format, and I’m not willing to sell my soul to MS just to read your document.  Please re-sent it in an open format (plaintext, HTML, etc)."  But not everyone is willing or able to make such a statement.  So the best thing to do is encourage everyone you know to save a few hundred dollars, use OpenOffice, and QUIT SUPPORTING THE MS MONOPOLY.

Sometimes, one just doesn’t WANT any help with whatever one is writing...

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