So last night my daughter came in the room absolutely beaming. You see, she had forgotten to copy down her homework in one of her classes. She wasn't happy that she had forgotten to copy it down and therefore would not be able to complete it. No, her school provides online access to homework assignments via a third party website. She was happy because she was able to retrieve her homework, open it, and print it from her computer running OpenSolaris while her mom wasn't from her computer running Windows Vista.

Apparently, her teacher uses MS Office 2007 and as a result, generates .docx files by default. Naturally, there are no associations for them when you use an older version of MS Office, so it simply doesn't recognize them. On the other hand, OpenSolaris with OpenOffice recognizes what they are and opens them right up. So it seams that OpenSolaris/OpenOffice does a better job here than Windows Vista/MS Office.

Actually, this wasn't the first time that we have run across this, we have received several Office 2007 files that end up forwarded to me to convert to Office 97/2000 files. It's just that the expression of joy on my daughter's face motivated me to share.




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