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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

I was going to say that... I love it when a Government site makes me download a MS Word or Excel file. So I need to either buy a Microsoft product or trust OSS solutions that often mangle the document (through no fault of their own... reverse engineering a proprietary file format is difficult and displaying it the exact same is even harder).

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While you can't edit, you can view for free:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10

It's good to know that exists.

For what it's worth, I have a Mac so those won't work. I don't have the time right now to search microsoft.com for a Mac version so I reserve judgment until then :)

Microsoft provides Windows images you can run in VirtualBox if you want to try it out.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

Obligatory "That's gratis, not libre!"

Eh.

  Supported Operating System
  
  Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows
  Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2
  
  Windows 7

So to view these propriatary document formats I'd first have to buy and set up a whole proprietary operating system?

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