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What to Call Office Suites and Their Formats

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Categories Linux FOSS Issues
Tags Microsoft Office

About how we refer to office suites. For a long time, many people have used Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to refer to these things: text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. This is not correct.

This is precisely because people have long used Microsoft’s software, making them think these are the official names of the files. Apple has also given its office software a series of names. However, when referring to these files, one should not distinguish them only by memorizing product names. In fact, Google does this more straightforwardly: it does not give them separate names, but directly calls them text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

That said, over-reliance on a certain office suite is not a good thing, especially when it is closed source software. Remember that user freedom is always more important than security and convenience; even ease of use is secondary. What matters is knowing whether what you choose is an open and free format. Important documents can be fixed as PDFs to prevent layout shifts, but office documents beyond that should adopt open and free formats, so that long-term benefits can be achieved.

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