I’ve rather made a name for myself as and anti-closed standards person on some boards I’m on and have perhaps pissed a few people off by implementing policies on file uploads etc. However, I recently got stung because I had saved important information (both my undergraduate theses) in a closed format a few years back. When I went to get at that information again a few weeks ago I realised I was in for a battle because the format I had saved the data in was no longer supported and since it is a closed standard no one else could make a viewer or a converter for it.<\/p>\n
No prizes for guessing which company swallowed both my theses, it was of course MicroSoft. When I was in 4th year I had discovered an obscure but really cool tool that came with MS Office 97 called "Binder". This allowed you to build up a document out of lots of sub-documents of any MS Office type. In other words you could have a separate Word Document for each chapter making it much easier to edit and also include Excel spreadsheets etc. All these sub-documents could then be printed as one document and Binder would make sure all the pages were numbered correctly for you. Binder saved all your sub-documents in one file in its own format (.obd file).<\/p>\n
When I went to convert my thesses to PDF for publication on my website I was horrified to find that neither Office 2000 nor Office XP had a clue how to open an Office Binder file. Some googling on the matter revealed that MS had abandoned Binder from Office 2000 on and had not bothered to even bundel a converter\/extractor or anything like that. If you had used Binder your documents were gone. MS obviously don’t give a damd about their customers if they dare use any of the more obscure tools they charge you an arm and a leg for. I was majorly not impressed.<\/p>\n
In the end I had to find a machine that still had Office 97 and then install a PDF printer driver to get my theses back out. It took me weeks and a lot of hassle and even now my CS thesis is missing two appendices because I had done those in MS Project and that too disappeared into the ether and I haven’t been able to find a machine with that installed anywhere yet.<\/p>\n
Bottom line, if you value your data save it in an open format so that people other than the company that wrote the software you use can write readers\/converters so you can always get at your data. Proprietary data formats are dangerous so don’t trust your data to the whims of people like MicroSoft!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve rather made a name for myself as and anti-closed standards person on some boards I’m on and have perhaps pissed a few people off by implementing policies on file uploads etc. However, I recently got stung because I had saved important information (both my undergraduate theses) in a closed format a few years back. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-34","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}