a minor spall chucker correction:
Line reads "completed that reivew (August 22nd)"
change reivew –> review

The wizard present in OpenOffice.org is a good start, but not enough.

My opinion is that only by "flooding" the market with correctly-formated ODF documents, dimishing the Microsoft quota, we will drive interoperability (because we will create *business concern* for being interoperable)…

However, if you read the Wikipedia article on OOXML, you'll note that it quite neatly conflates OOXML, ISO/IEC 29500:2008, and "Microsoft Office 2007 file format". So one gains the impression that OOXML is not only ISO-approved, but supported *everywhere*! I mean, even OpenOffice.org is listed as opening OOXML files!

So another side to the same FUD story, really. Especially when you look at the list of "supporting applications" in each article. The ODF article has thirteen apps in a dot-point list. The corresponding OOXML list has no less than 48 entries. So reading the Wikipedia articles, you get a somewhat skewed impression of the support for each of the formats.

Curiously, the reference cited for stating that Office 2007 SP2 supports ODF, is a link to an ODF Alliance fact sheet listing all the things that are wrong with the Office 2007 implementation.

Reading the edit history for the articles is kind of fascinating, in a train-wreck kind of way… :-P

Bob Sutor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML

List of all his contributions here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Alexbrn

@Anonymous,

Have you seen OfficeShots.org? They are attempting to provide the ability to see how the same document would appear when loaded in the various ODF editors. There is some talk of also having it run the ODF Online Validator against the document as well. So I think that gets us a bit closer. If you also had a database of known interoperability problems, and what applications exhibit them, then you could give a report for a given document: "Will work in OpenOffice 3.1, Symphony 1.3, KOffice 2.0, but will lose formulas in MS Office 2007 SP2". In theory this is possible.

If a Free (freedom) suite of program(s) is available, how hard would it for the program to identify the items that are outside the standard?

Could such a suite of programs then take the conformance + non-conformance profile, and estimate its likely origin?

And for the really tricky part, could such a suite of programs estimate how well such a document might fare if imported into a specified version of a specified program? (For example, note what extensions in a document would be ignored by the application.)

If Microsoft wants to implement inoperable ODF support, it’s really their choice. The issue is that I as a consumer cannot choose not to use their support and opt for a competitor’s.

I want to use the Sun ODF Plug-in, so Microsoft, please give me a way to get rid of yours!

Is there any independent confirmation that all those false claims were made by Microsoft? (Not because I don't trust Rob but because I want to be able to use information from this article to argue with people that don't trust him)

Wikipedia is being gamed by Microsoft-linked people that abuse the anonymity.

To my knowledge, all major ODF editors will read a conformant ODF 1.0 document today. Some, like Office 2007 SP2, will do it poorly, but they all should handle it, since ODF 1.0 is a subset of ODF 1.1 and ODF 1.2. You can try this with OpenOffice and Symphony and KOffice, for example, giving it an ODF 1.0 document as input.

Additionally, some applications like Google Docs write out documents with the ODF 1.0 version attribute set. So we have at least one editor that provides read/write support for ODF 1.0. My tests show that it can also import ODF 1.1 documents.

Finally, you can still freely download and use earlier versions of OpenOffice, etc., that write out ODF 1.0 files by default, if that is your need. Whether this use is "supported" depends on your support contract, e.g., what deal you might have with Sun on earlier version of StarOffice, etc.

Which key apps write out ODF 1.0 files?