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. "
Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
People use MSFT because they are already locked in. Word does what they want it to do (and sometimes a lot more than they want it to). Just because Sun gets to set the standard in XML doesn't mean that Office users are going to give two shits... As long as their Word documents continue to open and they can continue to email DOC attachments to their email instead of just typing in the body of the email they are happy.
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office. It will be free, it will be marketed, and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality. Honestly, as great as the OSS alternatives seem they just aren't Office/Word. You have to create a superior product and then market it. That's where OSS falls behind.
Everyone thinks that Firefox is so great. People weren't switching because they didn't know about it. Once IE vulnerabilities started showing up left and right they were alerted to the fact by mass media marketing. Sure, some people saw it and moved and even more didn't because they don't get their news from anything but the scrolling ticker below Survivor and The Apprentice...
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which features?
And how many people actually use those features?
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
Which features?
And how many people actually use those features?
Outline mode! That floating navigator is lame.
And the problem with the "how many people use those features" argument is that while almost nobody uses all of them, many people use one or two of them. I make do with OOo, but if I did a lot more word processing, I'd probably spring for word and that crossover thing to run it.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
6 clicks? Use the keyboard shortuts instead. (Score:5, Informative)
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:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Informative)
The navigator is fantastic, I love it. (And it is only floating by default, it docks quite happily).
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 r
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
2 MS Word's grammar checker is useless. It's just plain wrong most of the time. I accept that a spellchecker can perform a useful function, namely making a first pass over a document to pick out obvious bloopers for those too lazy to take the time to type and read it properly. But if you follow your grammar checker's instructions to the letter, you'll end up producing stilted, formulaic prose, devoid of any kind of individual flair. There's absolutely no substitute for learning how to do it yourself, by simply reading a lot.
If they didn't include spelling and grammar checkers, I wouldn't miss them a bit. And personally I think the grammar checker's a false friend which we'd all be better off without.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, I disagree. My spelling is good but I rely heavily on spelling checkers to catch typos. They won't catch a typo that resulted in a valid word, but they sure help.
Second of all, even if I agreed it wouldn't be relevant. You're not likely to convince people to switch applications by telling them they shouldn't rely on a feature they've come to expect.
I use the grammar checker much as I use the spelling checker: To catch typing mistakes. Sure, most of its suggestions aren't great, but it will catch sentences where, in the course of rewording something, I ended up with two "the"s in a row or something.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
The best 'trick' I can pass along:
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: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.
LaTeX (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Insightful)
LaTeX produces the most visually attractive documents out there--there's no reason not to use it.
Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Informative)
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 putat 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.
wrong example (Score:4, Informative)
LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)
Linear regression in open office:
LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)
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
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Insightful)
a) I know its a heavily debated topic, but my company LOVES the embedded DRM protections in documents - and all the federal customers we work with are also paying very close attention to it. Given the frequency with which you see a word doc accidentally posted online or forwarded to a non-company resource by accident... our management digs the ability to limit viewers of a file to our local network, and deny printing, editting, etc, to certain departments.
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, Insightful)
OpenOffice.org actually gets in your way more than Word by default, which is truly amazing. The main feature I wish it had is better Word compatibility. When I open a Word document, it should not:
I've had virtually all of thes
Re:Why would this lure them away? (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 format
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone uses all of them. You have to look at "everyone" as a group, and not as individuals. Not every individual is going to use every feature, but when you lump every individual into everyone, you'll see that every feature gets used by someone, somewhere at some times.
MS does a lot of research into what people want in their word processors and spreadsheets. If the OO team did the same, OO would have at least as many as the Office suite. It doesn't ma
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't just use Office because they are forced into it.
And then...
People use MSFT because they are already locked in.
Preview button, people!
As a web developer, I would prefer the XML document format to Word's format particularly because I can use different XSLT to display the data, meaning our clients would have greater control over their web sites without having to contact us for a lot of the changes. Just FTP the document to a specific directory and PHP can parse it out into a live page in a few minutes.
-1 Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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:-1 Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
An established standard will force microsoft to at least read it, though perhaps not write to it. I think that it would open a world of choice.
It would be more like Linux distros. You can have a bunch of them, all competing, but they are standard enough to be interchangeable without a complete change in business practice.
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, Insightful)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Informative)
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... ;)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would go your analysis one step further and say that people use Word, not because it does what people want it to do, but because so many other people use it. It is living proof of MSFT's continued reliance on being the "de facto standard" as opposed to an actual established standard.
Market share is its own reward and its own enforcer. Any competitor to any of MSFT's establ
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Legislation? long-term and public information (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's a bad idea to depend on ANY single vendor for the format of important records that have to be held long-term. We can still read the Magna Carta, no problem. Anyone tried to read Microsoft PowerPoint version 2 files? Or WordStar files? Even Word Perfect is increasingly complicat
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
People who actually create the standards like having buzzwords like "ISO standard" and "XML" somehow connected to what they pick - it looks good in reports.
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:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Informative)
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:Why would this lure them away? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many different kinds of people. I'm sure there are a few MS Office users that, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have come to the conclusion that MS Office is the best office suite for them, but I suspect that group is pretty small. There is also a group of people who, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have concluded that MS Office sucks; when those people use MS Office, they do so because Microsoft controls the standard.
And then there is the last, and probably by far largest, group of users: people who use MS Office not because they prefer it but because it is the only office suite they know and because switching to something else would be a big hassle. Part of that hassle is having to learn a new UI, and another part of that hassle is to try to convert documents in Microsoft's proprietary format.
and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.
The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office. Offering more features is not going to make an open source office suite win against Microsoft Office.
Quite to the contrary: an open source office suite probably can win away users by being more usable and offering fewer features than Microsoft Office.
It's about Salesguys (Score:3, Interesting)
More important then you think. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why would this lure them away? (Score:4, Insightful)
The best thing about standards... (Score:3, Funny)
Patent Threat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Patent Threat? (Score:3, Insightful)
the article is talking abou OO.o's [openoffice.org] xml format not the ms-proprietary one
Re:Patent Threat? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1762
Re:Patent Threat? (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Informative)
How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:3, Informative)
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:I wonder.. (Score:3, Insightful)
they may have to (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:to really lure people away from Office (Score:5, Informative)
Re:to really lure people away from Office (Score:5, Insightful)
OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between
This is a very important point which doesn't get stressed enough when people complain about MS office compatability.
Even different version of MS Office has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently... or a more appropriate comparison... even the same version of MS Office, for MacOS v.s. Windows has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently.
People also tend to rely heavily on the idiosyncracies of their local configuration (printer metrics, fonts, paper size) to align and layout their documents. An awful lot of people who write documents lack basic wordprocessing skills, yet they attempt complex desktop publishing tasks using a wordprocessor(!)
When these documents are converted into a different wordprocessor, it is no wonder that OOO can't match the nonsense arbitrary document layout ... it can't possibly know the idosyncracies of Bob's Win2k machine with a Lexmark printer, although it can attempt to match the idosyncracies of Bob's wordprocessor.
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.
Don't hold your breath (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt that a lot of people will abandon what has been hammered into them for years in favor of an open standard. There's not a lot of perceived value in switching.... yet!
Cutting down on vendor lock-in (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cutting down on vendor lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:4, Insightful)
not true. I rarely see a
I see PDF files as the defacto standard for communication.
PDF is the only file format that guarentees that anyone you send it to can read it.
I have not seen
Re:It won't lure anyone from Office (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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: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
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 someon
Re:Tell me... (Score:3, Funny)
Really? Exactly what do you base this assumption on? Are you personally acquainted with the people working on OpenOffice? Or did you just pull this out of your ass?
OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball.
Ah, definitel
Yeah, right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"
Call me a pessimist, but having a non Microsoft standard isn't going to matter much, what with Microsoft being able to make its own standard.
Besides, how many times have you heard office workers say "Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly or render transparent PNGs?!"
Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
OASIS standard too? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OASIS standard too? (Score:3, Insightful)
"the supplier will provide x computers with office software preinstalled. the office software has to fully support the features outlined in ISO 1234/56 and read and write files as specified there."
microsoft can either stay away or support those formats - both is a win. with OASIS they might start to ligitate ("but OASIS is OOo centric, the specification for the contract is slanted for them!"), but ISO is pretty much regarded as being as indepe
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:LaTex over Office? Bwahahahahaha! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who among you REALLY believes that the sea of secretaties and accountants and lawyers and paralegals who actually use a word processor every day would prefer to use LaTex over Word?
That's a meaningless question--LaTeX is essentially a file format, whereas Word is both a GUI editor and a file format. Given a front-end equivalent to Word's that used LaTex source behind the scenes, do you think most people who use a word processor every day would say, "Gee, I don't want to use this because the binary blob
Settlement... (Score:4, Insightful)
That would EXCLUDE extensions, meaning, the format, if embrassed by Microsoft would have to be 100% ISO XML compliant - No embrace and extend for you! (Microsoft)
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe for businesses, but not for the home users. The vast majority of them could care less about what file format things save in, assuming they even understand the concept of a file format in the first place - and really, why should they care about it?
The way things stand right now, 99% of the people common user's going to send files to is going to have Office available.
Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's an ISO standard it won't do a damn bit of good until the Microsoft OS's and Microsoft mail system and Microsoft Applications all know to do the right thing. Whad'ya think the chances of Microsoft cooperating are?
Re:Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files (Score:3, Informative)
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 Note
Government mandate is the only way (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers,
_GP_
Re:Government mandate is the only way (Score:3, Interesting)
OOo Reader App! (Score:5, Insightful)
A reader app is all we need! Email a
Starry-eyed optimism (Score:3, Funny)
*steals rose-tinted spectacles* Yoink!
Standardization already underway (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This would help me (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried to get peole to realize that in a few years, you won't be able to read many of the documents we are currently archiving because the office formats will have changed or the app that was used to create it might not be available to open it. I've tried to get people to save their read-only documents as PDFs and their "collaberative editing" documents as RTF, but this has proven to be difficult.
If I could go to my supervisors and point to an ISO standard format, I could more strongly argue for any "archivable" documents to be required to be stored in that format. From there it would me much easier to get people to save ALL their document that way.
I use OOo exclusively at work and love it. I am trying to get it installed as the default office suite on ALL new installations, with MS Office only installed on the desktops of those who can demonstrate a need (show me a document that won't work that you can't live without.) Right now OOo's documnet format is "just another word processing format". If it was an ISO standard, it'd have something strong to stand on for the "buzzword-only", tech-impaired descision-makers at work.
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.
Re:Switching from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe seems to support it. (Score:5, Interesting)
OLE Embedding Re:Feature set? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fat lot of good an open format is if users start embedding freaky OLE objects in, like "windows bitmap" as OLE instead of as bitmap, or windows metafile, or word art, or various other formats that only have windows servers for them.
Sam
Re:Standards and standards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Standards and standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a lot. There are four good reasons for using OO.org:
1. Cross platform support -- this is pointless for the people you're talking about.
2. Zero up-front cost -- not a benefit to anyone who's willing to pirate MS's software
3. Access to source code, ability to make your own improvements -- not a benefit to
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
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad decision. (Score:3, Insightful)
-N
Re:Bad decision. (Score:3, Insightful)
I routinely edit documents that are in the region of 150-200 pages long in OpenOffice, and save times only exceed a second if my hard disk is in power-saving mode. It is, in fact, faster than MS Word. This is probably due to the fact that less disk I/O is required on the compressed file than on the hugely bloated MS one.
The problem, however, is that it doesn't support background sa