Re: [Usability] Default document formats

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 03:58:49PM -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> 
> But the default needs, of course, to save data in a format that
> is Free, and also that is lossless.

The lossless criteria seems far more important to me.  Given the
quality of free filters available the definition of a 'format that
is free' is hard to nail down.  We can add a record type to xls and
patch Gnumeric and OOo to use it.  That seems free enough for many
people.  Over course the binary nature of the MS Office formats
makes them inconvenient for some types of work.  Anything involving
xml is better handled by SpreadsheetXML or OpenDoc.  However, that
seems like a decision for users to make on a functional basis not
political/ideological.

Given the state of office software development we're probably better
off using our native formats as the default.   They are far more
likely to provide 100% round-trip for data.  However, for a new
project like clahey's present (a power-point viewer), the
data-structures can be designed from the beginning to handle ppt.
In that case it make a lot of sense to just write ppt as the default.