ComputingConfidence

The industry has always wanted to standardize documentation as much as possible.  This became a challenge in the early 80's with the introduction of the IBM PC.  Early on Microsoft got the upper hand over Digital Research and Concurrent DOS.  With Microsoft's introduction of Word for MS-Windows and a complete dominance on the office desktop marked, this application's output became a standard along with Excel calculation sheet and their Power Presentation.  This was not an ideal situation.  The problems were many fold.  It would be very nice to have an open standard like the one achieved with Portable Document Format for the final documents.

The open source way has proved to be the best and most universal solution to achieve solid standard solutions.  Sun Micro Systems has been a great help on this front.  With their recent Open Office suite  available on most platforms, the Open Document Format finally became a standard.  During the transition the users of Microsoft's office pack can still read .odt files from the Open Office, assuming the user has updated to Microsoft Office 2007 or later.

Open Office from Sun Micro Systems offer Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Drawing.  All applications offer export to .pdf (Portable Document Format) and interface to other documentation formats, including the capability to read old Microsoft formats.  No need to say that there is little or no excuse for not switching to this new Open Document Format.

In Debian and Ubuntu you most likely have Open Office already, but in case you interact with Microsoft users without embedding the fonts you use, you might want to install the basic Microsoft fonts:

sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts

If you are confronted with a die hard MS-Word business colleague who insists you deliver in word format (.doc), I will suggest that you do not save or export the document as a MS-Word document.  This is because, if you do, you will then have several current versions of the document, this is likely to cause prolems.  Instead you can use the send option in Open Office to directly attach the document as a word document to a new email: