After the success of the IBM PC as a standalone product the large and mid-size system divisions tried to come up with smart terminals to compete with them. I think the real motivation behind that effort was to exclude competitive vendors from gaining a foothold with established IBM customers.
The success of TCP/IP in the 80’s and 90’s as a standard for data exchange overcame the attempts by the large-system divisions to keep IBM-proprietary communication solutions the norm with IBM hardware customers.
Thanks for all the replies. I had someone repair my Mac and install Libre Office. So far it opens my documents and spreadsheets fine and preserve the formatting.
But how do I designate it as the application launcher on Mac when I click on a file? It wants to default to Apple’s native Numbers and Pages.
Thank you so much for that. I have been saving files in .doc or .xls just in case I want other people to open them easily. But I get a warning about possibly not saving the format. If I save files in the recommended ODF extension, can others open it just as easily?
>>>Henrius Thank you so much for that. I have been saving files in .doc or .xls just in case I want other people to open them easily. But I get a warning about possibly not saving the format. If I save files in the recommended ODF extension, can others open it just as easily?<<<
Actually docx is the standard now. I have no idea the difference from doc. Henrius, Go into the options in Libre. There are a lot of them. Find the setting for “default” saving file. I have mine set to docx. I think you’ll like Libre Office.
From prior [bad] experience, I think likelihood of anyone being able to swallow “odf” files is problematic, so using micro$oft default and format is good. That is unless you somehow need formatting that cannot be handled, which is not likely.
While I am here, I will note that back in the old days, micro$oft was dumb and stupid and did not decide the file type based on content but on the “extension”. So you could throw a WordPerfect file named something.doc and m$word would accept it and even convert it but would puke if the file was named something.wp Then I have I have seen “word” files that m$word would not read, but were usable in Star Office.
By the way in Linux/Unix (including MacOS) the beginning of the file itself is examined to decide what it is. Micro$oft may very well be imitating Unix less poorly these days…
If you’re sending a file to someone to read or print why wouldn’t you just print it out with the “MS print to PDF” utility and send it. Just about everyone has the ability to read PDF files.
Of course it’s another thing if the recipient needs to edit document, then you’ll need edit-level file compatibility.
Me too, I pinned to my Win start bar, it’s a quick and east note taker. If you’re a Windows user you can print the contents to PDF and not save the Notepad file.