LibreOffice Calls Out Microsoft For Using 'Complex' File Formats To Lock in Office Users (neowin.net) 81
LibreOffice has accused Microsoft of intentionally using "unnecessarily complex" file formats to lock in Office users, claiming the company weaponizes its Office Open XML schema to create barriers for competitors. The open-source office suite argued that Microsoft's OOXML format includes deeply nested structures with non-intuitive naming conventions and numerous optional elements that make implementation difficult for developers outside Microsoft.
LibreOffice compared the situation to a railway system where tracks are public but one company's control system is so convoluted that competitors cannot build compatible trains.
LibreOffice compared the situation to a railway system where tracks are public but one company's control system is so convoluted that competitors cannot build compatible trains.
That is just the default UI (Score:5, Informative)
Re: That is just the default UI (Score:2, Insightful)
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FYI it's in "View" -> "User Interface..."
PDF file format enters the room (Score:2)
800 pound gorillia....PDF file format
Adobe has been publishing near monthly security fixes for Adobe Acrobat Reader for decades and it's is still widely used.
Re: That is just the default UI (Score:1)
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Re: less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:2)
Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you tried to buy the right license for the right job? Microsoft has made it intentionally impossible, outside of luck, to pick the appropriate product, the first time. They have N tiers for the same tools, with intentionally misleading descriptions, no clarity on the differences, pricing that looks like a paint cannon went off, and if you try to get support, just shove a dry butt plug in your ass, it will hurt less. Do you want to get into the administration side? No, just no, I don't have the strength and mental energy right now.
Even if they did build Office 365 for Linux, it wouldn't matter. Office 365 is considered a train wreck of an Office platform, its name is used as a joke. The only reason people still use it, is because Microsoft forces it in your face during installs and updates, they even place download icons in the start menu. If Office 365 had to compete in the real world, on a fair playing field, no one would ever touch it.
I don't even have to bring up the terrible formats and extensions, they're bad, and are a universal symbol of the incompetent professional, but we don't even have to worry about that.
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Do you think Office has a better UI then class LibreOffice? I guess that's an opinion, but in my opinion the Office UI is terrible, Microsoft is a master at terrible UI design.
Yep, same experience here. MS UIs do not aim to make users more efficient. MS intentionally (at least I have no doubt) makes UIs more cumbersome, slower, more clicks needed, because then users spend more time with that product and that, by an entirely perverted metric, makes MS more important.
This "success metric" can be found in one other place: Bureaucracies. Bureaucracies become more important (in their own view) if the can "bind" (i.e. waste) more time of others. MS uses the same disgusting and repulsiv
Re: less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:3)
MS intentionally (at least I have no doubt) makes UIs more cumbersome, slower, more clicks needed, because then users spend more time with that product and that, by an entirely perverted metric, makes MS more important.
I'm going to call Hanlon's Razor* on this one. Over the years MS has layered new over old again and again instead of starting afresh that a lot of things are so convoluted as to be a right pain in the arse. Ever notice that the settings dialog box for a network adaptor looks remarkably like the 98/NT4 version? That's not a design choice. The root cause is laziness if you ask me; it's easier to preserve backwards compatibility if you plaster over the cracks than tearing down and rebuilding.
* Though I prefer
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I used to be there, but making UIs harder and slower to use has been a consistent and a long-term effort with Microsoft. I now think it is highly probable that this is by intent. Yes, I know that an actual isle of technological skill and insight (even if used for evil) within Microsoft is not very plausible, hence Hanlon is definitely not off the table.
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MS UIs do not aim to make users more efficient. MS intentionally (at least I have no doubt) makes UIs more cumbersome, slower, more clicks needed, because then users spend more time with that product and that, by an entirely perverted metric, makes MS more important.
It's been a couple of decades since I used Office, but I occasionally watch her using it and the UI seems like an inefficient and confusing shit show. But she's so used to it that she doesn't like using LibreOffice. And TBH, I don't love their UI either. Then again, I don't use the product much.
This "success metric" can be found in one other place: Bureaucracies. Bureaucracies become more important (in their own view) if the can "bind" (i.e. waste) more time of others. MS uses the same disgusting and repulsive model.
I haven't spent much time working at big companies, but I've been on the sidelines as the company my wife works for gets bigger and stupider. It seems that at about a hundred employees a company is really straining t
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I find most Office UI to be pretty good, though I don't mean 365 here. The performance is terrible, though. This used to be true of LibreOffice, and Calc still crumbles if you really load a lot of rows into it and Excel doesn't, but the UI is really painfully slow on desktop Office now and I've no clue why. Nothing else I run on the same machine has this problem. e.g. I can scroll a PDF really fast and it draws fine, but if I don't scroll a Word or Excel doc really slow, it can't keep up.
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I haven't spent much time working at big companies, but I've been on the sidelines as the company my wife works for gets bigger and stupider.
I spent 8 months at one. Then I decided to leave a safe and well-paid job in the middle of a pandemic. I definitely saw more than a bit of the effect you describe in that time. Never again.
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Microsoft is "interesting" when it comes to UI because they are both co-responsible for the dominant paradigm we all know and use and are used to and hey, actually works... and have gone to shit since.
Microsoft was part of the Motif WG, Motif implemented much of IBM's CUA, and to this day Windows and all popular Unix DEs both still do. But on the other hand, Microsoft's greatest independent contribution to UI remains the start menu, which isn't even something they really invented; its best-loved form (From
Preach it (Score:2)
The switched us to Office/Outlook about a year ago.
Shit still doesn't work.
My only use of word is to format docs for the business types after I write them, so I don't really care about it. I mean, it is shitty, but whatever, I'm a Unix guy, I'm used to shitty UI.
What does bug me is Outlook. I get invites to meetings after they happen, mail gets randomly delayed for no apparent reason while I get oth
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Where this comes into UI issues, do you think the error is clearly exp
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MS, for *years*, has had nothing significant to improve in their Office apps. I mean, it's been what, 20 years? Certainly, all the basics have been well covered, and they moved on to the appearance of improvements, while adding features that nobody wanted, and nobody uses. Then, introducing new file formats and tweaking the behavior, so you need to upgrade to keep reading the stuff others send you. Well, OK, somewhere in corporate land, someone probably uses each of the oddball things Microsoft added to the
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I guess that's an opinion, but in my opinion the Office UI is terrible, Microsoft is a master at terrible UI design.
Microsoft only is a master of annoying users who want no change throughout their lives. The ribbon UI is far more useful especially to new people than the classic menu option of presenting every option to the user. The latter is great for power users who were brought up on that paradigm, and open source users who like to have every option available all the time. But for many people in the world the Office UI presented a world of improvements. All UI decisions by Microsoft are data driven. They put a lot of
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Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI - WHAT (Score:1)
Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:5, Interesting)
What? Working with LibreOffice is wayyyy more efficient than with MS Office. You actually find things and it does not take tons of clicks to do stuff. It does not permanently stand in your way. MS Office really has no chance in a direct comparison except with a few Stockholm Syndrome sufferers and these can still activate the stupid and cumbersome "ribbon" interface in LibreOffice as well.
And incidentally, LibreOffice, being derived from StarOffice has 40 years of development history. That is 5 years more (!) than MS Office.
Re: less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:1)
So LibreOffice is running 40 year-old code?
So LibreOffice developers have been with the proxy for 40 years?
That start date is really quite meaningless since the development team has likely turned over a few times and I'm certain the underlying software isn't based on anything from 40 years ago.
Microsoft has over 50 years in the computer industry, pre-dating LibreOffice by an easy decade.
MS Office was released in 1988, Star Office was released in 1985, but MS Word 1.0 shipped 1983 and MS Excel 1.0 in 1985 (f
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Are you functionally illiterate?
Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score:5, Informative)
So, LibreOffice has to care about OOXML because governments issue OOXML files. You can choose to not interact with private individuals and corporations using OOXML (in theory at least), you don't have such an option when dealing with governments.
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"Oh, my sweet summer child,"
As soon as you kick off with that nonsense, you have lost the argument. There is a nonce (I use that term illadvisedly) on the Register who still insists on using it.
It was a mildly amusing rebuke in, say, the noughties. Leave it there. Nowadays you simply sound like a fuckwit.
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I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).
LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990
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The best UI is the one you already know how to use.
Don't spread the Word (Score:1)
Format (Score:5, Insightful)
So you have a file format going back almost 20 years, that supports embedding almost any kind of content anywhere, that has had new features bolted on almost constantly, and also is backwards compatible so that anything not using a new feature is readable by older applications, and is also forward-compatible so newer versions of the application can render these documents accurately. And people complain that said file format is too complex?
For a comparison, go read up on how complex the TIFF standard is, and that is, basically, a bunch of numbers corresponding to color values in a bitmap. The ancient base-standard document is 120 pages long.
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Re:Format (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing Microsoft actually does well is backwards compatibility.
Odd, I haven't seen that. I have tons of old powerpoint presentations where half the images are replaced by a huge red "X" because the new powerpoint won't deal with them.
When I need to open old files, I use Libre Office.
--
(apologies for posting AC-- had a few mod points to burn).
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That's the weakest complaint. If the bad option names are documented, so what? You have to read the spec to know what to do anyway. If they aren't documented, complain about that.
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Variable names and what constitutes good or bad ones have been a point of contention and flame wars since most of us were toddlers, or even not even born yet. Remember those crusty old neckbeard rants we used to find on BBSs, usenet, and gopher about how "real programmers" don't eat quiche, program in Pascal, can diagnose bugs by watching das blinkenlights on the front panel, and write and deploy their code fixes by using the bit toggles on said front panel to directly change the assembly in-memory? Yeah.
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I once had to re-implement an application based on specification document. When doing that, several times I encountered a situation where I noticed that the documentation was not specific enough. I then realized that it would be extremely helpful if a specification would come with a sample code that implements it.
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Can't find any concrete references (too lazy). But I remember many of us (here on Slashdot and other dens of iniquity) laughing at the insanity of the OOXML format when it first emerged. Especially given the pre-existence of ODF.
The Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] does tell us the number of pages the standard runs to - it's greater than 120.
It also suggests there have only been two major releases of the format and the problems seem to have been baked in from day one.
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Well, they just could invent their own sane XML format (is that possible? Sane and XML?) ... ... /me runs and hides
And then use XSLT to either transform the bad bad M$ format into their sane one, or into the other direction
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For a comparison, go read up on how complex the TIFF standard is [...] 120 pages long.
A comparison needs information of at least two items.
Here is the length of the specifications for each document format:
Add on top of that misleading naming schemes and OOXML has a considerable higher complexity.
Re: Format (Score:2)
Obilgtory old joke still applies today: (Score:5, Funny)
Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Zero. Microsoft simply declares Darkness the new Standard.
been there done that, educate yourself (Score:3)
I've spent time on the difficult end of black-boxing a BINARY file format. You jokers with your XML and LABELS have it faaaaaar too easy. Here, I'll tell you my secret:
Gather as many saved files as you can, from as diverse of a group as possible. (there is NO upper limit, literally grab as many as you can) Write a short little test script to import and then export every single one. Then compare the export with the original. Refer the mismatches to the dev. I had over 1,000 test files in my suite, and in the initial release only a SINGLE flag was missed, because of all those test files, nobody implemented that feature and the dev guessed the storage would be the same as EVERY other one. (it turned out to be quite unique)
Oh and as for XML depth.... it's RECURSION. It literally does not care if it's 5 levels or 200 levels deep. (unless your IDE has a truly pathetic stack size)
So it's not difficult. QYB.
Microsoft committing anti-competitive behavior? (Score:1)
Every now and then nerds will realize that their computer is kind of suck because we don't enforce antitrust law but we always go back to sleep.
LaTeX (Score:3)
\documentclass{slashdot}
\begin{document}
\LaTex is the one true format. All others are trash.
\end{document}
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Indeed. And ODF is not that much worse.
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I think it was called FrameMaker.
It was so simple to invent a format for a text block, give it a name, and apply it where needed.
No idea why no office suit can do that 30 years later ...
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You are right that it is not up to Microsoft anymore. OOXML is an ISO standard, so "a member body of ISO, the secretariat itself, another TC or SC, an organization in liaison, the TMB or one of the advisory groups, or the Secretary-General" should make a proposal to revise the existing standard.
https://www.iso.org/files/live... [iso.org]
It's open but unnecessarily complex (Score:2)
... is the name of the Free Software anthem. Maybe not fair to lump all projects together but we're cutting really close to stone thrown from a glass house.
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^This^
That's always been my issue with the *Nix stuff... sure, it might run fine and be more stable (and if a user has the programming knowledge, completely editable to whatever they can dream up), but for the vast majority, it's too complex to get it running without having to read a document the size of the Bible, let alone open a file made in Office 2016 or whatever (whether it's a PowerPoint or Word or spreadsheet document).
While FOSS is a great idea, the problem is compatibility.
The general purpose of a
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This is about LibreOffice. There's nothing complex about it, or nothing more complex than MS Office. Try it, it just works. The interface is convergent with at least the older versions of MS Office (I don't know the more recent so I can't tell about them).
Compatibility... have you tried LibreOffice? It is MORE compatible with (older) MS Office documents than MS Office itself.
No problem (Score:2)
Microsoft's OOXML format includes deeply nested structures with non-intuitive naming conventions and numerous optional elements that make implementation difficult for developers outside Microsoft.
Just have Copilot refactor and document the format.
Good old crooked Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Because anti-competitive behavior is just that: Not competing on merit but instead scamming users and competitors. I hope there will be another massive fine from the EU incoming. Because obviously, there is absolutely no need to do it this way on the tech side.
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You are reading me wrong. The human endeavor is advanced by competing on merit. It is hampered by other forms of competition. You, know, commercial/evil.
Intentional? (Score:2)
I doubt it.
In my experience, the most complicated code comes from the hands of lower-skilled developers. It takes skill, knowledge, and intelligence, to produce code or file formats that are elegant and usable.
To the extent that they're right about the format, I highly doubt that it was *deliberately* complex.
Current formats much less complex than the old (Score:2)
Remember .xls, .doc, and .ppt files? They were both complicated and binary. The BIFF format, used in Excel, had a binary format built on record identifiers and length indicators, followed by variable-length data where each record type had an entirely different format from the other record types. Further, if you embedded a chart or image in an Excel file, the bytes of that blob were broken up into chunks and interspersed in the file at almost random intervals, with individual blobs cut right in the middle of
Bill Gates on StarOffice patent violations (Score:5, Informative)
Sent: Monday, December 07 1998 8:28 PM
To: Jon DeVann; Steven Sinofsky; Bill Neukom (LCA)
Cc: John Mason (LCA)
Subject: FW: free desktop suite from star
Importance: Low
Attorney client privileged
An Interesting development...
At some point we will have to consider the patents they violate. [gotthefacts.org]
Any sensible institution would ... (Score:3)
Hint: Open Document formats are your friend and MS formats are the work of the devil.
Make your own standard if you don't like it (Score:2)
I had a coworker ~15 years ago who hated MS to the point he used OpenOffice even though the company provided a license of Office 200x. Invariably, we would need to share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets and all worked fine until he got sent a copy to update. Every single time he touch a doc and sent it to anyone, the formatting and other components would get off. He'd complain MS wasn't following the correct format for Word/Excel/PowerPoint.
When we told him the "format" for their tools is WHATEVER
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That was long ago. I'm literally that guy today and there are no problems. I edit and send files back to colleagues, customers, managers, CEO. I use to use my separate MS Office laptop and check if my files opened fine, I don't do it anymore. There are no complains, and people don't even know I'm not using same things as them.
I do have a rare issue where LO incorrectly reads the crop settings of pictures from particular DOCX files and I need to set the crop manually before saving. That's about it.
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And ironically, I just looked him up on LinkedIn and he is a senior consultant for Microsoft!!!
In which phase is he? Embrace?
I hope he is not going to suffer from "Stockholm Syndrom" before he gets into the final phase!
Wow, this again... (Score:2)
This battle was waged. OOXML won. It's hacky, it's the default, there is probably better, but nobody cares enough to force the use of ODT. This is about working documents in organizations. The read only archives are all PDF.
If you want to displace those use cases, you need to have product that brings its own values and advantages to Office 365 users. No, being free isn't enough. Office and Windows is eighty bucks at most for a user per month. It doesn't take much to recoup that cost in organizations, which
gosh... (Score:2)
...Microsoft doing everything in its power to make sure it remains incompatible with the rest of the world.
Who would have thought?
Since ever (Score:1)
Old format (Score:2)
For governments, the things LibreOffice complains about with OOXML ought to be security concerns. If you can't know how to duplicate what's correct
Don't you mean comp.lecx file formats (Score:2)
The prosecution rests
Not news (Score:2)
When OpenOffice/LibreOffice were on the verge of winning major contracts, due to their open formats, Microsoft invented their own XML-based format. Anyone who has looked into it knows that it is an abomination. This is not news.
Add in some of the abstruse specifications, for example, requiring apps to reproduce an early Excel bug where it screwed up dates (because it thought 1900 was a leap year).
Companies still use office? (Score:2)
I haven't had a word/office license, or even been plagued with a windows machine of any kind, since 5 jobs ago. Maybe the stodgy old legacy grandfathers of tech still use office and windows. But all the startups I've worked for since have all used gSuite (or Google Workspace after the re-branding) for everything the house of gates used to provide. Endpoints have been all either Mac or Linux laptops in that time. At my current startup, windows machines aren't even allowed on the office wifi. And the onl