When Office 2007 SP2 comes out I will certainly examine it and do a blog post on what I find out. I have heard that there is a beta version of it, but this appears to be a private beta and I do not have access to it.

We are in March 2009 and MS Office 2007 SP2 ia announced for mid-April. So beta versions should exist…

As announced, Microsoft will (hopefully) support ODF in SP2

When SP2 is officially launched, what should a regular user do? Did you perform tests on this SP2? Can we RELIABLY rely on SP2 for opening/creating ODf documents or are they some proprietary “extensions” already?

The vast majority of MS Office users – should they still need third-party plugins or…

IMHO, this topic is so important for all the community that it worth a separate discussion on your blog…

Thanks A LOT,
Răzvan

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/newblog/index.php?2009/03/13/28-how-the-openxml-odf-translator-deals-with-formulas

I think we’re in a different situation than with HTML. We don’t have 10 million people hand-authoring ODF documents. We have 5 or 6 different spreadsheet editors, and the number of different namespaces in use for spreadsheet formulas appears to be only 2. So I think the Robustness Principle is appropriate here. But your point (Joel’s point) is well-taken. It can get out of control if you let it.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Basically the problem is that if few players (especially dominant players) accept broken, not standard-compliant input it makes standard useless: at this point it’s not enough to faithfully implement existing standard – you must process all quirks too!

That’s why all “broad inputs” MUST be discussed with standards group, documented and added to the standard (may be as prefix).

@Luc, If you look at the OpenFormula draft you will see inline test cases defined for each formula. Some smart person, i.e., not me, wrote a program to extract these test cases and make a self-testing ODF spreadsheet document. It puts the formulas in one column, the expected results in a second column and uses a third column to indicate whether the test case passed. The test cases used the OpenOffice namespace. I haven’t tried the ODF 1.2 namespace. If I did that I’d also want to be more careful about using the latest versions of the application, e.g., The KOffice 2 beta, or OpenOffice 3.01.

@Bart, I’m using the Sun ODF Plugin 1.2. If version 3 is out already, then I’m using an old version. I’ll try the new one.

That might explain the highest score, since it’s based on the OOo 3 codebase, beating 2.4 and other products based upon 2.x…

Since Koffice 2 is in the works, and the CleverAge team is also working towards a new version of their plug-in, we have a healthy competition going on :-)

Did you used ODS files making use of the OpenFormula namespace (prefix of.) ? Do the 6 applications already recognise this namespace ?