From the Straits Times forum: A Singaporean who uses Linux found it difficult to download information from a Government website, as Microsoft Office software was required.
His is a small voice in a country with a predominantly Windows base, but at least open-source users are starting to get heard in the national paper.
It will probably be some time before his wish comes true, but hopefully this will get the ball rolling.
In the meantime, there are some relatively easy ways to make documents accessible to more people. If possible, all Office documents should be converted into web pages. Word document forms can be converted into online forms. Simple Excel spreadsheets can be converted into online tabular data. Tantek Çelik, as Lucian notes, didn’t need to use Powerpoint for his presentation.
I’m no expert on OpenOffice. I tried it on my iMac last year and it hung. I guess I’ll try running it on another computer, just out of curiosity.
Feel free to correct or update this post with new information.
Further reading
Wikipedia entry on the OpenDocument format.
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