Tis easier to bring about change from within than outside.
Taking into account that the .doc files won't open in OO.o tell them
that you need to print it onto trees at uni to read at home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide
Ask them should a political group be fostering the digital divide? Are
they an elitist group? Then if the response is inadequate bump the
discussion up the environmental scale to Greenpeace or your
conservation
ministry. Somewhere someone should have a policy on the digital divide
and they can bring pressure to bear from above.
I bet you did your share of the antagonism, hmmm?
Being a bit of an open source zealot myself, I've long learned that
only more IT literate people can even begin to understand my
criticisms of the overuse of M$ Word for the content of simple e-
mails. Most users just think M$ Windows + M$ Office are just pre-
installed with new computers and that a computer without M$ Office is
like a car without a petrol (Microsoft) or Diesel (Apple) engine.
I'm always amazed how people advise me I need Adobe Reader to open a
PDF (which open lightning fast on this wee MacBook), but no warning
about the compatibility of various M$-centric attachments. Word .doc
files open in NeoOffice (Aqua version of OOo) in 99.8% of cases, some
smaller Docx files open. But I need a converter for Visio (a trial
version of Visual Paradigm does the trick) and Publisher files simply
won't open in anything but the version of M$ Publisher used to create
them (for that reason I has a Win98 machine with an old pirated copy
of Publisher just to open files from one client).
The real reason you should not send M$ Office files, and probably the
best way to convince Green political activists, is that they
significantly boost download time, i.e a 200 word (1200 character)
plain text e-mail takes up little more than 2KB with headers and
only, the same as a Word Doc is at least 50 - 60K and if you add a
logo, that can soon balloon to 200Kb+. I once received a meeting
notice with around 40 words and a cut and pasted logo. It measured
2MB. The most environmentally friendly solution, would be send all e-
mails as plain text with a link to an online PDF version. All they
need is the free and open-source OOo to generate that.
Neil
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