Star/OpenOffice XML Format To Become ISO Standard? 509
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. "
Patent Threat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Standards and standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see this become a standard, but we still have a long road until we can get rid of 'de facto standards' (read: MS Office). 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?
Turbo Smorgreff [www.des.no]
to really lure people away from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
Its the small bugs that make a big difference to the end user. Especially when opposite products own such a large market share.
Cutting down on vendor lock-in (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need, not mom-n-pop or real small businesses that don't actually manage their best practices.
I know I'm going to get modded into the toilet for saying it, but this is from years of experience in enterprise applications. OpenOffice might get there some day, but not until the people working on it and with applications around it are people who actually have made a living building advanced Fortune-50 caliber integrated information systems.
Bad decision. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:1, Interesting)
Abiword doesn't even work as well as Word Pad, let alone Word. I'm sorry. I really wanted to like Abiword (and OO.o).
Could be a cunning ploy to hobble OOo. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Which is something that M$ sure would like, as OOo is now getting to the point where it can start to compete with MS Office.
Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
I beg to differ (Score:3, Interesting)
uhm - what planet have you been living on for the last decade? It's very simple. People use MS Office because people use MS Office. Not because of the file format. I'm forced to use MS Office at $DAYJOB because my customers use it. They don't know the first thing about what file format they save their drivel in. They just hit "send as email" and forget about it.
I dislike MS Office as much as the next guy. If I had my way, LaTeX would be the standard. But if anyone thinks that an ISO label on a file format will lure anyone away from MS Office they're plain wrong. Period.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
This could possibly even force MS hand into complying with this format (or at least offer REALLY good import/export filters for these formats).
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't worry too much about proprietary software and closed source, but where data longevity is concerned I do care. Have you ever taken a look at those SXW word processor files? They're just ZIP archives containing several XML files, one for style, one for content, etc. Extracting the data from OO's data files is easy to do.
Re:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.
An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
Enough use individual features that it makes it impossible (or difficult) for those users to switch away. Each niche feature may only appeal to a small % of users, but taken collectively, there are a much larger number of those users who depend on those features too much to move away.
Additionally, it's not even about features for many people - it's about compatibility. Many of my family members use MSOffice at their offices and won't switch because the cost of converting and testing their Excel macros is too much to justify the conversion. And that's being generous assuming that 100% of what needs to be achieved in Excel via macros *could* be accomplished via StarBasic or whatever it's called in ooo.
Re:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:5, Interesting)
I will lure lots of people from Office, potentially. It's at least a step in the wrong direction toward bigger things.
Realistically, no big enterprise rollouts of Office are going to drop it in favor of OO.org just because of this, but those small mom'n'pop and small businesses out there that you conveniently ignore don't need Office. They mostly don't need even the bulk of OO.org's features really. They run Office because of lock-in and hopefully won't have to forever.
Those large businesses by the way probably love ISO standards. What if ISO standards dictate that any ISO 9001 certified company must maintain all its data in open formats - it's a stretch just now, but I see a lot of huge companies who love to put banners on their buildings bragging of being ISO 9001 certified.
This may have an influence enough that MS adds the ISO standard formats to Office, then OO.org really has no barriers to the majority of the Office market that doesn't need anything from Office but the file filters.
-N
Innovations I'd like to see (Score:1, Interesting)
What's the number one reason people under 21 use Word?
To write reports.
So, you'd think it would be good at it, right?
Nope. Word sucks for reports. Writing even one, there are a couple really obvious things. First, there should be an EASY way to text as no-spell/grammar check. Every good report has a bibliography. But bibliographies are always covered in wavy red & green underlines. Why? (Yes, I've seen allusions to there being someway to do this with the Find/Replace dialogue in the Help files, but yeah, that's idiot. What does marking text as no-check have to do with Find-Replace? Anyhow, I could never get it to work reliably...) Meanwhile, if Word is really a tool for writing reports, shouldn't there be a wizard for constructing simple bibliographies in say MLA and Chicago style. There should be no reason to go to a website like noodlebib for such things, as my school encouraged me to do.
Next, adding auto-captions to documents is worthless in the current implementation of Word, since there's no obvious way to put a reference to that auto-caption in the text and have it auto-updated too. (Again, there maybe some way to do it, but I struggled through the help files, to no effect.)
Other issue:
Title pages -- I shouldn't have to press enter a bunch to put my name in the approximate middle of the page. There should be a wizard of some sort that lets you choose between different layouts for title pages.
Bullets & numbering-- the auto functioning on this is a nightmare. If you could give lists names, then it would be much easier to say this bullet is part of list A, have it continue the numbering of list A not list B, which it is also adjacent to.
Blockquotes-- HTML has a tag for blockquotes. Why not Word? Blockquotes are a pretty standard feature in reports, but Word doesn't have a built-in style for that.
Meanwhile, I have constant struggles with fonts reverting to the default paragraph style at near random. (It seems to crop up when backspacing one paragraph into another?...)
I'm sure there's a lot more, these are just some issues off the top of my head. Star/OOo.org should tackle them if it really wants to make headway as an INNOVATOR instead of just an MS wannabe.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people do not have any idea how to save in a format other than the default. I have seen people insist on using MS Office because they did not want to learn how to use "save as" to save an essay for class in
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
In Linux I tried Gnumeric (nice and coming along fast, but still not even up to par) and OpenOffice (not even close).
And no, it had nothing to do with "being familar with the Excel way". I'd never needed to perform spreadsheet tasks before...it took me quite a while of reading docs to figure out how to even do a linear regression that looked nice in the GNU alternatives whereas it's a matter of 2 clicks of the mouse in Excel.
Your preaching to the choir when it comes to me and open source, but MS has the best office suite around............period.
and that is what this is for (Score:5, Interesting)
Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.
The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.
That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.
Re:Standards and standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Remind that that it is not only immoral, but it is also illegal. They have almost certainly given Microsoft permission to look at the contents of thier hard drive (in order to get patches), so Microsoft can figure out who has legal and illegal copies of thier software. As the record companies have shown, large corporations can find it in their interest to 'make examples' of a few individuals who pirate software.
Remind your friends that illegal copying costs Microsoft much more than Linux. Microsoft is quite willing to play hardball with Linux. So, it seems like they could also start to play hardball with users that illegally copy software. This is especially the case if Microsoft starts to have a hard time meeting revenue projections. Microsoft must keep growing if they are to meet Wall Street expectations. This may well force Microsoft to go after piracy as hard as they go after Linux.
Then remind them that OpenOffice is functional and that they are encouraged to use it for free. The developers want them to use it for free. In short, remind them that being immoral has its own costs even if you don't get caught. Then give them a moral high road; most of us want to do the right thing.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Interesting)
An EU mandate would represent a much larger stick than an ISO standard represents a carrot.
Re:Tell me... (Score:3, Interesting)
OO's system can't do 1/10th of the stuff Office 2003 is capable of doing where collaboration, workflow, process management and other important technologies are concerned.
Sure its got Java API's applications can be built with, but until someone builds a framework whereby you can actually do the stuff these businesses are wanting to do going forward, the API's are just that. Interfaces. Not applications.
There seems to be this opensource mentality of not "build a better application" but rather "lets beat Microsoft!". Thats going to get the opensource community nowhere, because very few people working in it have visibility into what these enterprises are actually doing across the board, and have very little visibility into the kind of big guns MS is readying to be able to meet those needs.
OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball. Can it meet those needs? Of course. But not until, as I said, the people pushing the development of these applications understand where they need to go to really compete. The future isn't about office suites and file formats, its about having all the business applications working together, so the processes a business has to follow day by day can be automated.
MS isn't the only company working on the frameworks and tools to enable that, IBM is putting a lot of research into it, too. What OO needs is IBM to throw its weight behind it, because Sun doesn't get it and has never gotten it.
OLE (Score:4, Interesting)
It would enormously help my development process to be able to create a document whose tables are dynamically linked from a spreadsheet.
In my case, the spreadsheet is a four column list of requirements (#, name, description, criteria to test). I'd like this to be the origin of all requirements, from which the SRS pulls line items and the build process checks source to confirm that every Req is represented in the object model, and no unaccounted for methods exist.
I can't do it in OpenOffice. I can open the spreadsheet file and pull requirements in the build, but I can't keep the SRS in sync with the requirements spreadsheet automatically to avoid document cruft.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. A spell checker that doesn't suck. I have found numerous REAL dictionary included words that OO doesn't recognize. Furthermore, OO has problems with spell checker word recommendations. Often it gives me horrible suggestions for my mispellings, MSFT WORD does much better under the same recommendations.
2. NO GRAMMAR CHECK!!!
I switched to OO because I hate supporting the MSFT, but when I started writing my documents in OO and then editing them in MSFT WORD I realized it was time to switch back.
Switching from Office (Score:5, Interesting)
Migration of existing files from MS Office is still the big stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption, and one that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that MS Office can't read or write OpenOffice.org files -- well, it wouldn't, would it? Putting in OpenOffice read-only compatibility would mean legitimising OpenOffice. Putting in read-write compatibility would mean suicide. So it seems as though OpenOffice will always be stuck playing catch-up over file formats
It's my understanding that the MS Office macro language can access and modify every feature of a document, and can also read and write text files. Surely, then, it should be possible to write a suite of macros that would allow you, using just a single licenced copy of MS Office, to read any Office document and re-export it in OpenOffice.org XML format?
Of course, in an ideal world, it would be illegal to lock up file specifications. Till then, we just have to run with the idea that if anything at all can read it, something else must be able to read it.
It's about Salesguys (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
> Which features?
I prefer OO.org myself, but here's a short list of a few problems I've found
- Word Art doesn't display or print correctly.
- Table of Contents is cut off in an imported Word Doc.
- No way to search for 2 consequitive enter/returns without some plugin that is slow, and doesn't work properly. (Find / Special Characters really needs to be implemented properly and natively.)
- Copying formatting is not the same as word. In word, you include the Paragraph marker. In OO.org you exclude it.
- Resetting Page Number in an already formatted document is quirky. You have to monkey around to get it to work properly.
OO.org is getting there, slowly. Fortunately, the above bugs/mis-features aren't a show stopper for me.
--
Original, Fun Palm games by the Lead Designer of Majesty!
http://www.arcanejourneys.com/
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
Reformatting 100+ graphs by changing a single file when your supervisor thinks that the graphs should look like "this" instead... o, no, let's make it "this" now... beats any other approach. Of course, when I have a bit of free time, I work on an OpenOffice macro to handle gnuplot calls transparently so that drawing a graph ends up being as easy as in Excel. I'll post it on sourceforge when I'm done... probably after I'm done with my thesis and have serious time to work on it, say in 6 to 9 months from now.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
gunzip xml format for cvs!! (Score:2, Interesting)
In this light, the one thing that troubles me about OOo's XML format is that there still appears to be no option for writing an uncompressed XML file.
Doing this would fix one of the worst things about putting documents into CVS (with, say, MS Word docs), that they are usually binary and not diffable.
The FAQ for OOo mentions some sort of "history" behind the decision not to do this. Whatever the arguments are against it, they can't be as important as the need to use proper revision control with documents.
I would further recommend a no-leading-whitespace formatting of said XML so that changing only the embedding of a document piece doesn't generate a diff jackpot.
Re:Government mandate is the only way (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Switching from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
The "re-training" thing is largely a myth anyway. All the typing keys -- letters, numbers and punctuation -- are still going to be in the same place, and the greatest single challenge inherent in creating any document consists of pressing them in the right order.
Re:OOo Reader App! (Score:2, Interesting)
1. PDF is usually bigger than the original
2. What if that person wanted to suddenly edit the file? If it were PDF, then he'd have to buy a fairly expensive piece of software like Adobe Acrobat. Normally, when we email a document file, it's for editting. When it's for viewing in final form, then PDF may be appropriate and should be put on a web server for everyone who needs it to download. Emailing something usually is for collaboration with others for editing.
3. So again, what if that person wanted to edit the file? I could probably give him a copy of OpenOffice.org, he installs it, then edits it right there and then. No having to wait for me to email it again because I sent it first in PDF.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to find excuses to sort of "flame" you. I'm just saying there are practical uses to both file formats. Besides, a reader app creates mind-share. It makes people realize that there's another application there worth using. Just as people suddenly realize there's this thing called Adobe Acrobat, simply because they have used something like Adobe Reader.
Or I may just be going psycho with all this. I do hope someone capable thinks "hey I'll start a reader project now". I'd be glad to help in anyway I can.
Adobe seems to support it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OOo Reader App! (Score:3, Interesting)
I hated pdfs until Preview [apple.com] came about.
Re:OOo Reader App! (Score:3, Interesting)
as a developer (primarily business apps)... an xml document format is much more flexible than the usual Word way of doing things (instantiate a word instance and modify the document etc...) - being able to use xsl/java/vb against the xml document then simply calling a lightweight engine to print (or convert to pdf) would be enormously handy
XML is already a standard (Score:1, Interesting)
When Microsoft changes to XML, then their files will also be standardized.
Does this ISO group want to make sure that Sun's file format will never change? Because it might, but it will still be XML, which would make backward compatibility much easier.
Re:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this because I'm a Linux user in a company full of Windows machines and users. .doc files are sent all over the place, I pop my mail off the Exchange server, I mount the corporate shares with smbfs, I use pptp to use the Microsoft VPN server ...
Re:This would help me (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying an ISO-blessed standard may not be a good thing - it is, but WP files are unlikely to ever have the issues that MSO can have.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
It's often useful to have full-fledged spreadsheets/charts embedded in your document that can be modified without a whole lot of copying, pasting,and reformating.
Never said that it's not. Which is why I use LaTeX. No copying, no pasting, no reformatting: I just change the source file and regenerate the .dvi. That's among the nice things offered by LaTeX.
Re:More important then you think. (Score:3, Interesting)
This would not just force Microsoft to start supporting these open standards, but it would have the same effect on a bunch of other companies, for example Seagate (maker of Crystal Reports). Not to mention the myriad producers of custom software for pharma and banking companies.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:1, Interesting)
Huh? You obviously have never worked for a big corporation or govt agency? The thing they LOVE are standards, esp. ones defined by ISO. Really, even though it wouldn't change things overnight, getting formal document (storage) standards would be a HUGE thing, eventually forcing MS to either get on board, to interoperate, or to alternatively pursue standardisation for their own "standards". And either of those would be a Good Thing (tm) for competing products, essentially forcing opening of Word, either via its features (plays nice with others), or via its file format (standardization of word file format).
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:2, Interesting)
As non-native english speaker I can
(1) not spell english as good as I would want to, and
(more importantly)
(2) not distinguish between american and british spelling. Of course I am learning, but it does take time. This is a thing spell checkers are good at. (point (2) I mean).
Re:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:1, Interesting)
You do know that OpenOffice is to Sun Microsystems [sun.com] what Mozilla is (/was) to AOL? Or are you saying Sun is bunch of mom'm pop amateurs with no Enterprise Grade expertise?
Further, OOo was started by open sourcing of the original StarOffice code base (just like Mozilla's beginnings were from Netscape 5 codebase... except Mozilla dropped the code, OOo didn't); SO having been written by a reasonably big german proprietary software vendor, over multiple years (about a decade). So it's anything but a simple tool hacked together by hobbyists.
Maybe you were thinking of some of the other Open Source word processors? Or maybe you just have never used OOo (or SO) and just argue based on prejudices?
Re:Government mandate is the only way (Score:3, Interesting)