ODF

An updated version of the Microsoft-sponsered ODF Add-in for Word has been posted. A few weeks ago I had tried out the earlier 0.1 version with results you can read here and here.

The Add-in’s Highlights page for the 0.2 version says that “This release is comprehensive with respect to Text, Formatting, Paragraphs, Images, Styles & document metadata scenarios”.

So, I gave it a try, installing it with Office 2007 beta 2 running on Windows XP. Here’s a summary of what I saw.

The UI integration I previously described and criticized remains unchanged. This will put ODF documents at a disadvantage not only compared to Word’s native format, but also compared to other export formats suported by Word such as RTF or even plain text. The only other format that will be ostracized from the File Open menu like this is PDF, and that seems to be because of legal squabbling with Adobe. But what did ODF users do to deserve this treatment?

I tested a conversion with my sampler.odt file. This is a one-page ODF document that uses a combination of essential word processor features. It is not intended to be an acid test. Unfortunately the 0.2 Add-in failed to load the document at all, hanging with the winword.exe process spinning at 100% CPU. So there appears to be some sort of infinite looping going on.

I tried a few variations of this sample.odt document, removing page elements until I could get it to load without hanging. It appears that the image with the caption may be the source of the problem. I’ve reported this defect to the project’s bug tracker and will try again when I hear that it is fixed.

Brian Jones in his blog entry of 11 July 2006, comments on their recently announced ODF Translator:

It’s directly exposed in the UI. We’re even going to make it really easy to initially discover the download. We already need to do this for XPS and PDF, so we’ll also do it for ODF. There will be a menu item directly on the file menu that takes to you a site where you can download different interoperability formats (like PDF, XPS, and now ODF).

Heck, if you wanted to be even more hardcore, the Office object model allows you to capture the save event. So if you wanted to you could make it so that anytime you hit save you always used the ODF format, just by capturing the save event and overriding it. I’m not expecting folks to do that, but it does show just how extensible Office really is.

One might ask, is it a “hardcore” view to want ODF to be the default format for documents saved in Office? Isn’t this exactly what Massachusetts ITD requested in their RFI?

What Jones does not say is that Word 2007 puts the ODF format at a disadvantage, making it harder than necessary to work with. Although end users are given a simple and direct UI for changing the default file format in Word 2007 to other file formats such as RTF, DOC or even ASCII text, ODF is not allowed as a default. Why should ODF users be forced to use “hardcore” programming to capture the “save event” to accomplish this same task?

Let’s take a look at the UI we’re given. Screen shots are based on Word 2007 Beta 2, and the ODF Add-In for Word 2007.

Launch Word, create a document and try to save it, using the File Save menu, or the age-old familiar short cut, Control-S. What do you get? See the following screen shot for the familiar File Save dialog. Although Microsoft formats like DOCX, DOC and XPS are available, as well as export formats like PDF, HTML and Plain Text, you will not find ODF listed.

One new twist is the “Tools” button added to the Save As dialog. Pressing that reveals new options including something called “Save Options” which looks like this:

Here we see how Microsoft treats the file formats it favors with first-class support. Word 2007 allows you to choose which file format will be the default format when you save a document. You can keep the default format (Draft Office Open XML) or choose the legacy binary DOC format, HTML, or older formats like RTF or even Plain Text. But you will not find the ISO OpenDocument Format on this list.

So the question to ask is why Microsoft integrates ODF in a way which treats it as a 2nd class citizen, treated less favorably than even Plain Text?

• ODF cannot be made the default format
• ODF documents can not be round-tripped
• ODF documents are not accessible via the familiar keyboard shortcuts for opening and saving files (Control-O and Control-S)
• ODF documents pay a performance penalty for having to be indirectly converted via Draft Office Open XML rather than via native support

[ 7/2/6/2006 The integration discussion continues here]