[softwarecreator]

However, considering that it's our tax dollar that they're spending, all government documents should be available in a completely open, fully documented format.

That mean no MS SQL Server for government storage, no Word documents, and no Active Server Pages.

hmmm ... I see what you are saying and agree with your assessment.  I know about MySQL and PHP to replace SQL Server and ASP, but what open source application would you suggest to replace Word, Excel or Powerpoint?  I have a client who may be interested in this and I'd like to check it out. . Is "OpenOffice" available for Windows or is something else better?

[N3WBI3]

Yes Openoffice is available for Windows and MacOSX..

[markedmannerf]

go to http://www.openoffice.org for open office. Its wonderful! I use it at home instead of Microsoft office and best of openoffice is free and open source. Everyone should give it a try. It has excel,Powerpoint and Word like programs

[Knitebane]

Is "OpenOffice" available for Windows or is something else better?

Available for Windows, Solaris Sparc, Solaris x86 and Linux

OpenOffice.org file formats are pure XML, with the option of compressing it with gzip. Note that this is entirely unlike the new Microsoft XML format which is a Microsoft proprietary file format wrapped in XML.

In the absolute worst-case scenario with OpenOffice.org, an OpenOffice.org doc can be edited in any ASCII file editor. If you had a lot of docs to rescue, you could write a Perl script to strip out all of the XML, saving the text to ASCII, CVS or other simple format.

In the absolute worst-case scenario with Word or Excel, you rewrite your data from scratch.

Guess which one happened at a place where I worked?