I just want to contribute with your text about Rob’s Mary (if we can call her that way), and her experience with MS Office 2007 and ODF… It goes that way:

“…And Mary needs to update her spreadsheet with more updated prices, and as a good and modern bride (yep, the lady uses ODF), she always carry that precious spreadsheet on her pen drive.

Away from her computer and seeing that MSOffice 2007 now supports ODF, Mary uses a friend’s machine with MSOffice 2007 to update her spreadsheet.

She open the document and fell very happy and comfortable when she sees “everything there”, update a previous imputed price, and gets noticed that no new calculations are made… Seeing that she needs to give the machine back to her friend, she thinks “OK, I’ll solve that latter, let me just save my update to guarantee that I don’t lose the new price”… And she save (overwriting the original file) and close Excel.

Latter on, when she arrive at home, she opens the document again and discover that all her formulas have magically disappeared !!!

Crying and feeling sad about it, she thinks “Oh dear God, what my future husband will think about me, now that I was screwed by someone else….”.

This is only a *draft*, not yet approved.

ISO/IEC/Whatever 26300 talking about ODF 1.0/1.1

If the Office Suite use ODF 1.2, it is *out* of standard!

Where is the interoperability?

Follow ISO/IEC/Wahtever 26300.

We did a lot of “buzz” about “Community obtain a ISO standard”, but now WE fragmented this standard.

Use ODF 1.2 right now is not correct to get interoperability!

Regards,
Renato S. Yamane

“From the user’s perspective, I don’t think they really care what ODF 1.1 did or did not specify. They know that Microsoft provided an ODF Add-in for Office”

And that is what they have: An ODF 1.1 add-in. The issue is not ODF 1.1 compatibility, it is OpenOffice compatibility. Naturally it is a shame that OpenOffice doesn’t support ODF1.1 but it’s their problem. It is also a shame that ODF 1.1 is not used by many else, but it doesn’t surprise anyone since as a standard it is totally useless for spreadsheets.

kspread2 opened all the files, including those created in OOo 3, MS Office 2007 and with the Sun plugin.

The formulas actually worked in all of them, although the MS Office 2007 document didn’t show the dates.

I uploaded a screenshot.

Funny thing is, the entire right column will probably be fixed in a matter of weeks, if not days, by a large crowd of agile and competent open source developers. The small quirks of Excel-poisoned ODF seem easy enough to accept in a benevolent file importer.”

Ahh, so it’s HTML all over again is it? Is that what anybody really wants? If people spend their time doing this, then most of the effort that went into ODF will have been for nothing. I hope they refuse to let M$ dictate their file format, rather than be fools and bend to it for so-called `interoperability’.

And .. didn’t they state early on that they were only going to do 1.0? Why is it surprising in any way that 1.2-format data doesn’t work?

you may be interested by this explanation of the handling of spreadsheet formulas in the Microsoft/CleverAge OOXML/ODF translator:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/newblog/index.php?2009/03/13/28-how-the-openxml-odf-translator-deals-with-formulas

I also found back a funny discussion about spreadsheet formulas between Doug Mahugh and Jesper Lund Stocholm in the comments of the following blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/02/19/building-consensus-around-odf-1-2.aspx

Doug explains there why Microsoft does not intent to be compatible with the OOo formulas:
# dmahugh said on February 20, 2009 12:13 PM:
[...] One interesting area is spreadsheet formula syntax — since ODF has never had such a syntax in any published version of the spec, implementers have used other standardized formula languages such as the one in IS29500 (as is allowed in the current ODF spec). [...]

Doug then reacts to a comment by Jesper:
# dmahugh said on February 21, 2009 2:38 PM:
[...] Jesper, if I understand your point correctly, you’re saying that you don’t mind if documents containing IS29500 formula markup are unable to ever be conformant to “pure ODF 1.2″ [...] My view is that this would needlessly punish users of ODF who currently save formulas in the only ISO-standard formula markup language available for this purpose. [...]

This triggers the following response from Jesper:
# Jesper Lund Stocholm said on February 23, 2009 3:10 AM:
[...] Seriously, Doug … please don’t play the “reuse exisiting ISO-standards or users will be punished”-card.

Let’s see what happens when we bring that up and use it in Excel 2007. Would a few overdosed children get the point across?

It would really be a PR disaster for Microsoft if it can be demonstrated that Microsoft Office is not best at providing consistency with old versions of Microsoft Office.

The bashing Microsoft takes now for using a special namespace for their formulas is probably a very calculated damage to avoid the upcoming PR disaster if they join OpenFormula and fail.

Only by strictly implementing ODF 1.1 and claiming to use the “superior OOXML documentation” can Microsoft stall the time when the general public discover how Office 2007 and OOo actually perform.

“Microsoft recognizes that customers care most about real-world interoperability in the marketplace, so the company is committed to continuing to engage the IT community to achieve that goal when it comes to document format standards. It will work with the Interoperability Executive Customer Council and other customers to identify the areas where document format interoperability matters most, and then collaborate with other vendors to achieve interoperability between their implementations of the formats that customers are using today.”

What every happened to “real-world interoperability in the marketplace”?

The problem here is really that Microsoft wrapped everything in their own namespace instead of only those parts that cause trouble for other applications.

I have heard that the ODF interoperability TC has decided to define two conformance classes. One that allows extension and one that does not. This is a good idea, but Microsofts (and SUNs) messing with namespaces show that interoperability also require a commitment to not use extensions when a basic alternative is present. I think that one of Oasis TCs (I don’t know which) need to add such rule.

For example, in a table with the name SampleTable the cell in column 34 and row 16 is referenced by the cell address SampleTable.AH16. In some cases it is not necessary to provide the name of the table. However, the dot must be present. When the table name is not required, the address in the previous example is .AH16.Note: I added the emphasis.

The formulas in the MS Office 2007 file do not include the dot in the cell reference, so they’re invalid, regardless of the formula language.

@Morten, If your goal is conformance without interoperability then you can achieve that with almost any standard, ODF included. If your goal is interoperability and conformance then you can do that with almost any standard, including ODF. The fact is that many vendors are already interoperable with ODF spreadsheets today. Even Microsoft’s own ODF Add-in for Office was interoperable and conformant. So why the whiplash change in SP2 to break interoperability?

@Enrico, That is just me, being lazy and not typing out the entire namespace URI. The standard does not rely on equivalence of the namespace prefix. However, I have noticed that some implementations seem to check only the prefix and not resolve the it to the URI.

@Andreas,

The latest draft of ODF 1.2 does require the use of OpenFormula for conforming spreadsheet documents. I agree with you in hoping that we can reduce the number of implementation-defined behaviors in OpenFormula.

@Tim,

From the user’s perspective, I don’t think they really care what ODF 1.1 did or did not specify. They know that Microsoft provided an ODF Add-in for Office, sold the press on this, played it up as a big interoperability initiative, milked it for all it was worth, and then came out with SP2 support for ODF that broke all of these customers spreadsheets. Microsoft doesn’t need to justify their choices with me. They need to justify it with their own paying MS Office customers. Perhaps I should be happy? These customers will now find that their spreadsheets are more compatible with IBM Lotus Symphony than with MS Office.

@Eomon, Yes I have tested other document types as well and there are some interesting things to report there as well. But this blog post was already getting rather long, so I made this one deal with spreadsheets only.