One of my students this semester has hair longer than mine. Maybe that's why he's been writing such great blog posts! Anyway, I thought you might enjoy or profit from his review of free alternatives to Microsoft Word. It's fairly comprehensive and even has screenshots. Check it out!

I was browsing the template library of Office 2007 today when I came across an interesting "academic" letter template: "Complaint about Teacher." The letter is probably what you could expect from a parent whose kiddo isn't making the A's she rightfully deserves. Here's a few snippets from it:

Ars Technica reports that Google has urged for ISO rejection of Microsoft's OOXML format as an international standard.

There has been plenty of other criticism of the standard. But I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I would prefer that everyone--including Microsoft--embrace ODF. A file format developed and maintained by an open standards organization is preferable to a Microsoft-controlled, poorly designed OOXML.

However, if Microsoft continues to resist ODF and never gives in to supporting it, is Microsoft more likely to well-support OOXML compatibility across MS Office upgrades if it is an ISO standard? Or will they continue to create problems for competitors and users by implementing changes in OOXML that make upgrading to the latest version of MS Office the easiest path to compatibility with MS Office produced files?

Slashdot reports that Microsoft has released the specifications for their binary office productivity file formats. Translation: projects such as OpenOffice can now see how Microsoft encodes .doc, .xls, and ppt. Bad news: the file specifications are so overly complicated it is not likely to save on previous efforts to reverse engineer these formats.

While certainly the open source community and open standards advocates can't get excited about the usefulness of the specifications, it is an indication of the positive influence promoting and fighting for open standards is having.