The proclamation has been…..proclaimed. Everybody in the company I work for has been told to stop using Microsoft Office by the end of the month and start using OpenOffice instead. This could be interesting. Take a company of 7,000 employees, withdraw their primary productivity tools and see what happens.

Me? I’m all for it. I try to avoid using Excel, Word, Access or whatever else microsoft include these days in the stupidly large Office suite. BUT, and it’s a big but, I do all my documentation of projects in Word driven by several extremely useful templates. These set up the whole format of the document through macros and rule out about 70% of the humdrum work that I might otherwise have to do. I can’t be left to do it myself, since every document I design on my own uses so many font styles it looks like a ransom note.

Now that the big change is upon us, I find that we don’t have an analog in OO, for some reason. We’ve got less than a month to make this switch for us to produce an alternative to several hours of formatting documents that I went through earlier this week. I’ve contributed a few ideas myself, but they’re less than 1% of the solution. I detect late(r) nights ahead while we get around this, but at least marketing can preach to the world that we’ve done part one of the big swtch.

I think someone needed to think a bit harder about consequences before formulating the text of the press-release I can hear choo-chooing around the bend.

Ho hum.

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