[antiRepublicrat]

And writing these formats? If you send something to the government, it generally has to be Word or Excel, although PDF is often accepted. A more open format would be preferable. Picking a closed format, making our government and people beholden to and at the mercy of one company, is just plain wrong.

[TheEngineer]

And writing these formats? If you send something to the government, it generally has to be Word or Excel, although PDF is often accepted. A more open format would be preferable. Picking a closed format, making our government and people beholden to and at the mercy of one company, is just plain wrong.

First, I explained that the govt doesn't force citizens to use Word/Excel/etc for reading documents by showing that free readers are available for all these MS-Office components.

Second, There are a multitude of free and not-free programs which will produce documents in Word/Excel/etc format. As an example, Wordpad will write documents in Word format. Therefore, citizens are not required to buy Word to send documents, either.

And regardless, all of the documents that I've sent to the govt in recent years were in PDF format, which disputes your claim that Word is their preferred format... and these were fillable forms, so I wasn't required to own the $200 full version of Acrobat (which I do own, anyway). A few years back, the FCC preferred Wordperfect format, but I never had any problems reading/writing their documents with Word.

And any computer-formatted document exchange requires that the citizen at least own a computer -- and that's a much steeper financial requirement than owning MS-Word (which comes bundled cheaply with many PC's). But, since Microsoft doesn't manufacture computers, you appear predicably unfazed about that requirement.

And these are just the most obvious biases, holes, and inconsistencies in your argument.