Save as formats explored

[Bryan Quigley]

> I know people who still use StarOffice 5.2 so there are surely people out
> there who still might use these formats.
I am happy to look at actual use cases for these formats.  Why do they
still use StarOffice 5.2?  (Is this more common than I think?,  Are
they using it on a OS platform that is still supported?) What format
do you send them documents in?  What's keeping them from upgrading to
LibreOffice?

> If you can provide some numbers that show that nobody has used this feature in a long time I think we can agree to remove it.
All the data I can really provide is from Google filetype searches:
Here is ODT: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=filetype%3Asxw#hl=en&q=-facebook+filetype:odt
Note that there don't appear to be many false positives.

Here is SXW:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=filetype%3Asxw#hl=en&q=-facebook+filetype:sxw

Note the abundance of false positives.   If you switch it to past year
on either, for SXW you get two pages of results (all false
positives?).

Like the Word 95/6.0 file formats, I would expect more people use this
accidentally then still use it.  And yes, the results aren't loss of
data; just loss of time and possibly sending someone a document they
can't open.   (Remember Office 2007/2010 can open ODF now)

This is the same reason I want the Flat XML versions to still sound
technical, so that average users don't accidentally pick it.  Users
will ignore options they don't understand.

When I don't see a need for saving to the format anymore and I think
there is a high chance that users will accidentally pick the format
that's when I propose removing it.   As for removing clutter, that's
also important.  We don't have the 80/20 rule in effect for file
formats and I'm not proposing it.  I would guess we closer to a
99.999/000.001 ratio before we start removing a file format.  There is
a real cost in users looking at options that will never be useful to
them.

Thanks,
Bryan

*Facebook appears to be spamming Google results...