Please, is there any news about ODF support in Microsoft products – any news since MS Office 2007 SP2 ? Are they going to change anything about it (via online updates) or it is "dead in the water" ?

For Office 2003 or for future Microsoft products (Windows 7, Office 2010), does someone have any clue ?

Thanks a lot,
Răzvan

In a previous era, ATT were a dominant telephone service vendor. Should ATT allow inbound phone calls from, or outbound phonecalls to, customers who subscribe to non-ATT phone services ?

ATT were dominant in the USA, but not dominant in the rest of the world (e.g. Europe). Should they have interoperated with European phone services ?

If your products don’t interoperate with your competitors’ products, then your customers cannot interoperate with your competitors’ customers.

Nowadays, of course, there are all kinds of cellphone service vendors and ATT was broken up into ‘Baby Bells’ by the US Government.

Any any phone can call any other phone, across the USA (and throughout the world), no matter who provides the dial tone to each phone.

That’s good for consumers, and for consuming businesses.

That’s why you should interoperate.

I think there *could* have been a defensible middle ground for MS to take on spreadsheet formulas.

If they don’t want to recalculate (and possibly come up with a different answer), they could simply protect both the formula cell, and all referenced/chained input cells.

After all, unless the input changes, the formula never needs to be used, and the ODF format specifies that the last output value is kept too.

“Same question.”
“Same answer!”

By trashing formulas in other namespaces, MS has taken the lowest of low roads…

Name Withheld

https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Office2010TheMovie/Content/Home.aspx

Has anyone tested this, please, to see how the future “interoperability” will look like in MS world ?

Regards,
Răzvan

If you do so, users will think you are the faulty application, not Microsoft. That’s the clever trick.

-Stephane Rodriguez

Let’s say Institution Alpha has decided to standardize on ODF and tests to see if there programs can read MS-ODF files. The spreadsheet loads right up for all major vendors, and when they save from the other vendors and reopen in MS Office they don’t see any broken formulas, so Alpha decides to buy MS Office and standardize on it exclusively to reduce training and IT costs.

Later, a small company called Beta Incorporated is working with Alpha and receives an MS-ODF spreadsheet to make corrections on. Alpha receives the corrected file and rejects it because it has no formulas, only numbers. Beta Inc. must now purchase MS Office in order to output a compatible spreadsheet. At that point, they have to justify the expense of MS Office, and they have other customers that use it, so they decide to give up their existing software for MS Office, even though they had a perfectly good ODF-compliant office suit to begin with.

Note that this chain of events is broken if vendors simply keep the existing behavior. MS-ODF files would be found by Alpha to not be interoperable, and either they’d use a plug-in or they’d rethink using MS Office at all. They might choose to drop ODF as their general spreadsheet format, but most office suites can load proprietary Microsoft formats anyways, so interoperability would actually be improved. Better a tamed wolf than a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I was probably not clear enough.

When I said ODF-compatible applications should support MS-ODF natively, I meant during the file reading phase. So the updated applications can read both ODF and MS-ODF, encompassing everything out there.

-Stephane Rodriguez

If the other ODF vendors start to load formulas from the ooxml namespace then the MS will be able to start dancing the “OpenFormula support will be added when at a later point because OpenFormula was designed after MS Office so we must change lots of unspecified code” and all the time postpone the date when they actually start being interoperable. You can not bargain with MS when you have given in.

Until MS start to load the formulas from all competetitors the ODF vendors must not start to load ooxml formulas.

The first correct step is probably that all ODF vendors start to output warnings when the ooxml namespace is encountered with information to the users that the document was created by MS Office that has modified the format used for it to be unable to be loaded and information about how to send bug reports to MS.

I have the complete Oxford English Dictionary on my computer.

Dictionaries merely record usage – whether such usage is accurate or not. If language is not used carefully, hostages are given to fortune – and frequently money is given to lawyers. Indeed, the whole SCO case (and the very existence of Groklaw) rests on such use and mis-use of language. The Microsoft OOXML/ISO shambles involves a very great deal of the same.

I repeat, if standards matter, they matter in English (or any other language used for communication).

@David Newkirk: ‘…you are unable to refute him on the merits of his argument’.

I am not trying to refute him. I agree with his argument. I am simply trying to point out ways in which he can strengthen it – and not undermine it by his own efforts.

This is exactly what MS is hoping: create a mess that others will have to clean. This is the only way they are used to compete.

Doug and al. are hypocritical when they claim “we replaced an unspecified formula syntax by an ISO standard one”, knowing perfectly that
- the formula syntax in OOo is the same as the one in OpenFormula,
- the formula syntax in OOXML would have been rejected as a stand-alone standard by ISO, in the same way as VML was rejected; both became part of an “ISO standard” via the OOXML backdoor,
- the formula syntax in OOXML will sooner or later be replaced by OpenFormula, even in the MS products.

So replacing the OOo syntax by the Excel syntax, as easy as it can be, is moving backward rather than moving forward. And is creating a mess that everybody will have to clean and a legacy that will be floating around for a long time.

OASIS will win the standard ODF battle, in the same way as W3C won the standard HTML battle and Sun won the standard Java battle. But MS tries to postpone this as much as possible, by creating as much mess as possible to distract their competitors and waste their resources. It started with imposing everybody to debug their OOXML “specification”, then to write OOXML input filters, now to write MS-ODF input filters, and possibly MS-ODF output filters. What’s next ?

All these efforts are distracted from what should remain the community main goal: develop a good ODF standard and good ODF applications, and foster their usage.

Also, this would be diverging from OpenFormula. OpenFormula is very close to what the vendors are already writing out today in ODF applications. In fact, replace the namespace in the test documents I created and they would be perfectly correct OpenFormula formulas. The syntax in OpenFormula is not novel compared to what ODF vendors are alread doing. What is new in OpenFormula is a very detailed description of formal semantics.

If vendors move to the Excel-style encoding, it would be diverging from ODF 1.2 creating more junk for us to clean up later.

A mechanism by which today’s ODF compatible applications can neutralize MS-ODF is by supporting it natively. It’s not very hard, since it’s Excel’s formula syntax, not a 3rd variant. Note that this applies to everything formula related (such as chart data sources), not only cell formulas. This should be a proprietary so that the user experience is smooth.

If OpenOffice and others directly support MS-ODF, silently and nicely (converting it to real ODF without the user knowing at every opportunity), it keeps afloat the investment in ODF. Otherwise, it’s highway for MS-ODF.

-Stephane Rodriguez

The following links are fine to remember how was the scenery years ago:

. Bill gates memo about Office customer lock-in via undocumented proprietary extensions

. “Microsoft on standards” article –Orlando

And Microsoft will claim that only OOXML files processed by Microsoft software is a safe approach… despite this being far from the truth, but which spin doctor would care ?

Regarding the recent fiasco about the-no-interoperable-way-of-Microsoft-implementing-ODF-support-in-Office-2007-SP2 perhaps we can say that Microsoft is an “onanist” in standard implementations?

[0] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/D0jMP25Gs1s/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html

This being said, if MS is not stopped by a competition law regulator, it will likely happen (within six months being more realistic than overnight).

And it will be faster if all the other vendors play MS catch-up and support their currently non-interoperable MS-ODF files…

Once again, MS will have succeeded in fragmenting a competitive technology and pushing the interoperability burden to their competitors. Sad…

But as the 500+ million installed base covers all the version of Office, and as SP2 is usable only with the Office 2007 version, it will take some time for MS-ODF files to outnumber the other ODF files.

Six months is surely more realistic than overnight.

“There have been millions of downloads of OOo 2.x and 3.x. “

Those couple millions pale compared to the MS Office install base (500+ million), and not to discount the power of distribution subsequent to that install base. My customer data shows that people out there install the latest service pack very fast. And by people I mean corporations of all sizes.

Don’t forget, everybody uses MS Office, so it’s already installed. If you need to download (subject to permission in the organization), install (permission) and use (permission) OpenOffice in order to view a .odf document, it won’t take long before people make it a habit to use MS Office and get used to the limitations and problems.

Let’s see, 6 month for now, where we are.

-Stephane Rodriguez