[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?

[softwarecreator]

Note that this is entirely unlike the new Microsoft XML format which is a Microsoft proprietary file format wrapped in XML

I haven't done any XML work in anything other than a .Net environment, so I was not aware of this.  Thanks for the heads-up.  I'm supposed to work on a small project next month with PHP and XML, so I will have to look into this.

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.

Nice.  Someone was thinking correctly when they built this application.  I can't even count the amount of data, reports or docs I've lost because of the formatting in MS.

Guess which one happened at a place where I worked?

Been there.  I think excel is prety good for the most part, but like you I've had to attempt to rescue data that was impossible to retrieve.  I worked on a project for a Ford affiliate where they used excel as their only data storage unit and backed up nothing.  What a disaster.

[an amused spectator]

Guess which one happened at a place where I worked?

Ooooohh! THAT'S gonna leave a mark!