Star/OpenOffice XML Format To Become ISO Standard?

Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "

Re:Patent Threat?

[Anita Coney]

There is no patent threat here. Sun is immune.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17627

OASIS standard too?

[eGuy]

There exists a technical committee at OASIS [oasis-open.org] to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice) [oasis-open.org]. How does this differ if it's a ISO standard as well?

Re:to really lure people away from Office

[MemoryDragon]

It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better. OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found. The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format) Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.

No patent threat

[Anonymous Coward]

MS pantented the way of saving documents with all pictures etc in *one* XML file. In fact, OOo documents are ZIP files, containing different XML files and the pictures in for example PNG format.

Furthermore, the patent would not remain valid in court as at least AbiWord has prior art.

Re:Standards and standards

[cbiltcliffe]

I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends. Anybody care to comment on what can be done to 'sell' OO.org to these people?

Call the BSA on their ass? Once they get a few million dollar fine for using "free" proprietary software, they'll probably not be such a fan of it anymore... (Only partly joking...)

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[magefile]

I spend the majority of my "working time" on the computer word processing, and I actually prefer OO.o. Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six). And I can create my own outline, thank you very much. Better that way, too, since it gets you to think about what you've written rather than just pressing a button.

Re:Could be a cunning ploy to hobble OOo.

[McCall]

ISO can tie a standard down in a tangled mess of beaurocracy ; while this might bring credibility it also runs the risk of preventing OOo evolving its formats as fast as it would like to.

This wouldn't happen. There isn't anything to stop the OOo developers from starting an OOo v2 document format with new features, but still retain the OOo ISO options within OOo.

The OOo v2 document format could then go on to form the a new updated ISO format, and the OOo developers could then add the new features to the OOo v3 format... repeat until nausea.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[magefile]

RTFA. They recommended that MS make their formats open by submitting them to standards bodies; stop using non-XML formats (only some stuff is currently XML); and (I think) read OO.o files. So they didn't twist MS's arm, but they did encourage the release of those formats.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[Carthag]

It is possible to do this, at least in a corporate environment that uses common installs or images. This method is for 8.0, but I'm sure it's possible ith other versions too.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0 \W ord\Default Save]
"Name"="Default Format"
"Value"="SEE BELOW"

Where it says SEE BELOW, insert one of the following (or google for other options, there are many):
(nothing) (default, Word 8.0)
HTML
Text (ascii encoded text)
Unicode (text format with unicode encoding)
rtf

We did this while transitioning to WordPerfect (with the code WrdPrfctWin) when I worked at an unnamed government institution in Denmark.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[claar]

Hmm.. upon googling [google.com], the top link sent me to a microsoft documentation piece [microsoft.com] telling me how to set the default save format (Pretty tough; Tools->Options->Save->"Save Word files as" drop box). Works like a charm in my MS office XP (2002) install. You can even use the System Policy Editor to set it organization wide. So I guess we've got All we need to break the Office monopoly.. woo hoo! Or not..

Re:I wonder..

[Lord_Slepnir]

Kind of how like how Microsoft (please, don't ever use 'M$') obeys ANSI C standards in VC, like how they oben the W3C html standards in Internet Explorer.

How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[mantera]

What are you talking about?!! I have office 2003 on this machine i'm working/typing on but what do I use as my office application? Opeonoffice/Staroffice. Why? because it's already BETTER!

It will always be available to me, it uses smaller yet more reliable and open file format, it works faster than MS word and can even open word files that word itself chokes on, its autosave function is FAR more reliable than word's autorecovery, it never messes up formatting and especially outlines and bulleted lists the way word habitually does, i love the autocomplete feature, stylist and navigator are GREAT for accessibilty and ease of use, I like its templates/autotext/macros and the way they're implemented, I like the way its toolbars and keyboard shortcuts are customizable more than i like the way word does them.

Re:Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files

[PhoenixFlare]

I send out flat text files to co-workers, and they complain that they cannot open them because they don't have the appropriate reader on their (Microsoft) E-mail system. Yes, I know that notepad and Word and probably other applications can "open" a text file, but none of the defaults are set to do this automagically.

I don't know what your co-workers are using, but my copy of Win XP (and 2000, and 98, and 95 before that) and the various versions of Outlook i've used all opened text files just fine in Notepad without any fuss - always have, never had to change anything.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[dorward]

Outline mode! That floating navigator is lame.

The navigator is fantastic, I love it. (And it is only floating by default, it docks quite happily).

they may have to

[jeif1k]

There is a real chance that, if the OOo format becomes an ISO standard, organizations will put it onto their requirements checklist. In that case, Microsoft may not have much of a choice but to implement it.

-1 Wrong

[brunes69]

This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.

If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.

If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile

Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[garcia]

Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six).

Do you mean five in Word or were you talking about another word processor? Word: Format -> Paragraph -> Line Spacing -> Double (this is a stretch as it's really only a single click but I am giving you the benefit of the doubt) -> OK

Although I have the Formatting toolbar enabled and it's only two clicks for me.

Re:Patent Threat?

[MemoryDragon]

Yes they do but, the openoffice is the prior art to this. The openoffice file format existed long before Microsoft even applied for the patent.

Re:LaTeX

[Anonymous Coward]

If I understand correctly, 'advanced graphing functionality' allows you to create graphs in msword?

Hmm. For graphs I just grab an EPS output graph from XMgrace and load that in as an image. As it is an EPS, the quality of the image is as perfect as it gets.

I don't need my word processor to include Gimp / Paint. There's perfectly good programs for that.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Sique]

The main problem with Microsoft's formats is that they are basicly memory dumps of the actual data heap. To have a program read those memory dumps it has to follow the memory structure of Microsoft Office, which is not easy even for Microsoft, because they change their binaries from time to time, thus making their own product slightly incompatible to their format.

In the most cases it's very odd combinations of different features used in a document that causes the incompatibilities, often they aren't that easy to reproduce. I had MS Office dying in serveral versions due to Word-Documents, which where written in one version of Word, later converted to a newer version and converted back to the old one (this happens quite easily if you are working on the same document at different workplaces with different versions of MS Office installed.)

Programs that are just trying to make sense from the dumps without trying to mimick the memory structure of MS Office have on the one side an easier task because they can't run into memory leaks, dangling pointers or otherwise corrupt data in memory. They interprete the data as an odd structure on file, not in memory. So often those corrupt Word documents could be saved by reading them into Open Office and saving them again in Word format. On the other hand they are often at loss with structures that in some magic way work with MS Office because of some not-quite-bug-not-quite-feature program part. With those situations at hand you may loose some formatting or some contents of your Word files. So it's always recommended to proofread your document after opening it in something else than Word.

But you should also proofread them when you are opening them with just another version of Word, even with a different Service Pack level of the same major release. You never know which bug was fixed where and which odd behaviour which accidentically made your document format right doesn't work no longer.

Standardization already underway

[Florian]

In fact, the Openoffice XML format has already been submitted as the base of an open XML-based standard for office documents not to ISO, but to OASIS, see the coverage in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. A draft version of the OASIS Open Office XML format already exists, and once the official version 1.0 is out, both Openoffice (the program) and other free software office suites such as KOffice will switch to it as their native file format (as covered, for example, in this Linux Journal article [linuxjournal.com]).

Making the OASIS Open Office XML format also an ISO standard would surely be nice and make it look better on paper to corporate and institutional IT managers. But for the EU, the current standardization process through OASIS should be good enough, since the question is whether controlling the format by two standards bodies at the same time will be technically feasible at all.

wrong example

[an_mo]

Linear regression in excel:

LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)

Linear regression in open office:

LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)

Re:-1 Wrong

[42forty-two42]

Actually it's a .zip not a .tar.gz. Other than that, you're correct.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[kayak334]

Excel, for thechnical graphs? you are joking right? If you had said Microcal Origin or Sigma Plot I might have taken you seriously, but Excel?

I don't know how "technical" you consider a chemistry lab for school, but Excel actually does a wonderful job at making lab graphs for a lot of students.

Re:I wonder..

[IntergalacticWalrus]

> How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.

No they don't. Microsoft never explicitely creates standards. Instead they would use their global monopoly to force darkness into being mainstream. Once it is done, all light sources become unused by the general public and slowly die from lack of user base, even though they were superior to darkness in the first place.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[Spoing]

1. not true. I rarely see a .DOC file in the company for ANY business documents, including files from outside the company.

Not true ... for you. For me, it is quite different. I see MS Word .DOC files constantly...even for trivial memos that would be better done as normal text.

PDFs mainly appear for external documents. Even policy manuals tend to be both created in MS Word and passed around as MS Word .DOC files.

I've gotten no complaints from using OOo to create and save documents in MS Word .DOC format, though changing existing .DOC files in OOo has caused problems in the past -- usually with indented bullets. MS Word is supposedly to blaim for mangling bullets, though I don't have evidence either way.

1. [...] Granted, some silly people in Marketing, specifically the new ones, try to use .PPT files as their preferred communication style and document. but they get flamed to crispy death by most of sales and the entire IT department when they do.

I typically get "Can you give me that as a .DOC. I need to edit it." Editing usually consists of a logo change and having the person change or modify the attribution.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[tmasssey]

Actually, the reason for the memory dump (serialized objects, IIRC) was for document load speed.

About the time this decision was made, most formats were in large part tag-based formats (in concept very much like OO.o's, BTW). The problem is that parsing that data stream, building a document structure in memory, presenting that to the user, etc. takes time. Microsoft figured that by skipping the transformation to and from an arbitrary file format would speed things up.

And it does. Pretty dramatically, in fact. That was a *big* deal a decade ago. Even today, that is a problem for OO.o: document save and load times lag behind Word by a *large* margin. It took me 5 seconds to save an *empty* OO.o document. The same thing in word took Of course, the Word file is like 24k big, and the OO.o document is only 4... ;)

6 clicks? Use the keyboard shortuts instead.

[Kaimelar]

Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six).

I do it with no clicks -- Ctrl-2 for double-spaced, Ctrl-5 for 1.5 spaced, Ctrl-1 to go back to single spaced. This keyboard shortcut works in both MS Office and OpenOffice.org. Another option, as others have pointed out, is to customize your toolbars -- again, a solution that works for both products.

Re:LaTeX

[Coryoth]

Honestly, after hearing the buzz about latex, I went and looked at it. Unless you're doing print setting for professional use, it's far too complicated and powerful.

LaTeX really isn't all that hard to learn, but it is very powerful. Want to know why I use LaTeX? I wrote a couple of document classes for LaTeX - now that took a little work but its done, and never has to be revisited - so that when I write a report I can simply put

\summary{bullet point summary of what follows...}

at the top of every paragraph as I write my report. What's the advantage of that? Well, as long as I do that, as well as LaTeX producing a beautifully formatted report, I can just change the documentclass from report to presentation and produce a beautifully formatted powerpoint style presentation from the summaries I gave.

I even have some finer points that let me share content (figures and graphs for instance, or perhaps a set of equations) across the report and presentation so they appear in both.

The power of simply writing a report with quick summaries every now and then, and at the end of it automatically having a slideshow presentation is stunning. Having both items, report and presentation, shared in one document so changes automatically propagate to both is amazing.

Show me how to do that in Word or Powerpoint in anything approaching the simplicity and ease of use that LaTeX provides and I'll consider switching. I don't think I'll be switching.

Jedidiah.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice point about the grammar checker but the spell checker is a wonderful thing. I'm great at spelling but not so great at typing, and I have to bang out thousands of words every day in my job in emails, tech specs, miscellaneous documentation, etc. I have to do everything at top speed and taking the time to check my stuff thoroughly for spelling just won't happen. Everything gets a once over with the spell checker and a quick eyeballing and then gets sent off to wherever it has to go. Spell checker makes me insanely productive and keeps me from looking like a total idiot. Now if only I could learn to dress myself and stop drooling on the keyboard.

Re:OLE

[fiftyfly]

Weel there is the data sources manager. It allows you to reference all kinds of dbs & socuments as data sources, even spreadsheets.