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My understanding was that MS Office's implementation of ODF (at least in Excel specifically) had some serious issues.

The "issue" in this case is that spreadsheet formulas (and some other things) are underspecified in the text of the standard (see here and here and here), and the (proprietary) MSOffice implementation is different from the (proprietary) OO.org implementation. Specifically, MSOffice uses formulas as specified in ISO 29500:2008 (that is, ISO-amended OOXML).

This wasn't the case just between MSOffice and OO.org, by the way, other implementations had similar interop problems. One of the links above describes such a problem between OO.org and KOffice

OO.org had since moved to implement a draft of ODF 1.2, which does cover spreadsheet formulas. Other FLOSS word processors have followed suit. However, MSOffice remains an ODF 1.1 implementation, with no stated goal of having OO.org compatibility.

That said, MSOffice ODF formulas are still open in a sense that there is an open specification for them.

Microsoft stuff isn't just a scare story. The Office Open XML debacle is only a few months ago, and as far as I can tell they committed an actionable fraud in connection with it. I have independent comfirmation for what is at that link.

It's sort of like a totalitarian scare right after Tianammen Square, where we had real reason to be scared. By the way, China's problem is totalitarianism, not communism. I've met a head of state who calls what Microsoft does "corporate totalitarianism", and I think he's on target there.

I think we should fight Microsoft, not Sam Ramji. We should just make it clear that Sam works for a company with a monopoly conviction and a long record of dirty fighting.

Microsoft's joining Apache, to a great extent, as an anti-Linux play. They still can't stand the GPL, it's too fair for them, but they think they can take some of the oxygen from Linux by being more of a platform for Apache-style software. And the Apache license lets them "embrace and enhance".

Don't give up now, folks. Only your vigilance and your willingness to point out when Microsoft plays dirty tricks will keep them from getting away with even more of that.

Bruce

Whether or not the opensourcerer is right (though the numbers seem to correspond with those of openmalaysiablog), I think we have to brace ourselves for the worst. Even with Norway having its vote suspended, that wouldn't be enough, and now Trinidad and Tobago and Slovenia (both P-members) seem to have changed from abstaining to approving, which severly diminishes any hope of getting the whole thing tossed out.

I seriously like your idea of calling it the "Fools Standard", though. Let's hope we never have to use the term, but if we do, let's at least hope you've created a new meme :)

Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"

6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body

Denmark

The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.

The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

• 12 votes supporting the reccomendation,
• 10 votes rejecting it,
• 2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!

Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !

M

Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"

6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body

Denmark

The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.

The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

• 12 votes supporting the reccomendation,
• 10 votes rejecting it,
• 2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!

Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !

M

The members are not supposed to be known much less harassed, bribed and otherwise courted.

A lot of stuff is happening that is "not supposed to."

If the British Standards Institution (BSI) registers a vote in favor, Office Open XML would pass one of two criteria to becoming a standard, but fail the other.

That's the peril about commenting on the outcome of events still in progress. Several other participating (P) nations have since then changed from either Abstain or No to Yes. If all else remains the same then moving UK from No to Yes puts the proposition over. Check it out yourself.

They have some other interesting observations too.

I like the voting overview and discussion on OpenMalaysia blog better.

I thanked Mr Cheong, for bringing up this important letter from Mr Patrick Durusau. His case just highlights the strange situation we are in today. If you know the background history of Mr Durusau, you will understand why he may have to write a letter like this.

You see, Mr Durusau is the Editor of ODF, but more importantly he is also the Chair of the US Technical Committee V1, which is equivalent to Malaysia's TC4 here. What is interesting, is that because of this OOXML issue, his committee has been stacked. Now it's OK for them in the US to stack their committees because that's how their system works, so they grew from a committee of 7 members before OOXML to 26 members after it started. Fortunately, in Malaysia, ISC-G prevented this from happening at TC4.

[...]

So in essence, V1 has been taken over by Microsofties, and Mr Durusau is in a tight situation. If he were to be negative towards OOXML, his stacked V1 will retaliate and bar the progress of his normal work: work on ODF 1.2.

The best and most logical option for Mr Durusau is of course to "agree" with his captors 'demands, and hopefuly they would be merciful later on. So its a strange political play which he has to act out.

Well, I probably am off-base this time. But if you see how well the Intel graphics chip family work these days with X (I have both a low-end and a high-end instance of that chip family), then it's easy to wonder "so what the heck is going on with Windows, and why".

Read this article. Microsoft wouldn't be doing bizarre stuff like that if they didn't think there was a war on.

Bruce

Stop spreading this FUD.

Microsoft introduced it way back in 2006, and it was debunked immediately.

There's only one side fighting dirty. Microsoft keeps trying to spin this as though it's evil competitors trying to hurt poor little MS.

It's not.

It's Microsoft fighting its own customers desire for free formats. Competitors don't pay monopoly rents for locked in products. Customers do, and Microsoft wants to keep it that way.

The correct link is here: http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/06/is-vml-in-or-ou.html

I see you have it as .htm instead of .htmnl; which results in a 404.

And VML is used in Office 2007... see this openmalaysia blog post. Marking things as deprecated just means that it's discouraged, and it doesn't mean that there's a modern replacement (like how in HTML FONT was deprecated and it's replacement was CSS functionality). VML is still a necessary part of OOXML, so marking it as deprecated doesn't actually help developers. What would help them is if DrawingML could be used in all the places that VML can be. Infact, as the CNS (Microsoft's covenant not to sue) specifically excludes patent coverage over non-required features this means that we may now be lacking patent coverage over VML. Can anyone from Microsoft comment on this? (the Microsoft OSP might grant coverage if that "Necessary Claims" means normative, as they claim)

Round() or ceiling()? ;-)

Looking at this Malaysian link you gave gives me a headache.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematically-.html

The ODF guys don't like the definition of Excel's CEILING function, so they 'correct' it based on what Mathematica does. But they add a third optional parameter to give the legacy behaviour. So now you can have a formula with works in Excel or one which works in ODF but not both and the converter needs to do these transformations (from one of the commenters) -

Excel to ODF

CEILING(N,S) -> CEILING(N,S,1)

ODF to Excel

CEILING(N,S) -> SUM(CEILING(N,S),IF(N lt 0, IF(MOD(N,S)!=0, -S, 0), 0))
and
CEILING(N,S,1) -> CEILING(N,S)

But how do you handle ODF->Excel->ODF? Looks like you'd quickly paper yourself into a corner, especially if the user edited the absurd first formula so the converter couldn't tell that it could just transform it back to CEILING(N,S).

And I can sense that the first ODF to Excel transformation will fail in a few cases, just because it is so complex. And why do you make it so hard for Excel which accounts for probably 99% of spreadsheet use to use the standard, other than sheer hatred of Microsoft?

And if you look at the Mathematica function, it takes one parameter, a complex number, and rounds to the nearest integer. Excel's CEILING takes two parameters, a real number and a precision to round to. As some of the commenters point out, Excel's attempt at extending CEILING to take a significance parameter isn't wrong per se. So Microsoft made an arbitrary choice about which direction to round negative numbers and the ODF guys made the exact opposite choice, really for no reason than to make things hard for Microsoft.

So I can quite see why Microsoft wanted a standard which doesn't have 'features' like this. They want to just export the CEILING function in EXCEL into an OOXML file and preserve the semantics. At least they've defined their CEILING function in this case. Expecting them to use a standard which can't round trip and nitpicks the way Excel works and uses that as an excuse to make it hard for it use the standard is ridiculous. And it's just spiteful to then try to stop them getting their own OOXML standard ratified if that's the way ODF is going. This is the sort of behaviour that everyone would be angry about if Microsoft were doing, and yet when it's the good guys doing it everyone pretends they're only concerned about mathematical consistency.

In fact the whole thing is so incredibly annoying that I hope they maintain their monopoly on office software and ignore ODF completely just because that will make the idiots who played such absurd games with ODF angry.

"objectively horrible" eh? ;)

Well, how about the propagation of historical bugs?

Within OOXML they have ways of dealing with some historical bugs (eg, autoSpaceLikeWord95). When a future revision of OOXML defines what autoSpaceLikeWord95 means then OOXML implementors will be able to distinguish bugs from how it should be.

However this technique is used selectively within OOXML, for example take the 1900 leap year bug, or the 35+ bugs in spreadsheet formulas.

ODF 1.2 with OpenFormula has an approach of adding additional flags to be compatible with historical bugs while preventing bug propagation in future documents. See this blog post for more

Microsoft have stated that the 1900 bug in Microsoft Excel was done to emulate a bug in Lotus 123. Correct blame is good, but we should still squash this bug now.

There's no technical reason for propagating this bug, and we should not allow this in an ISO standard.

Apart from common sense, of course.

This is another red herring that has been addressed many times before, including here. http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/02/microsofts _defi.html

Microsoft is spinning duplicate standards as "choice" when in fact acceptance of MOOXML as a standard would be a breach of ISO's mandate.

You should expound your vitriol a bit earlier in the proicess :

Take a look at the board :
http://www.incits.org/ebmem.htm

Here's some reporting on the last vote
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/ansi-denie s-oox.html

Maybe you should read about the actual OOXML specification before saying that kinda thing.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-fa ilure.html
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/
http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/07/18/T18_02_54 /

Read these. Then decide if you really, really believe that making this specification a standard will do anything good for the environment. The spec is simply too big and poorly-defined for anyone else to come close to implementing. If it was worth the paper it was printed on (and if you see the last link, that can be quite a lot) Microsoft wouldn't be trying to fast-track it--specifications should speak for themselves in terms of quality. Anything reasonable would have no trouble getting written into an ISO-accepted standard, no matter what company it came from.

Pop quiz: Why the hell is fast tracking with this kind of system possible? Emergency economic situations?

Yes, OOXML is richer, specially when you want to represent dates: http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/06/malaysias_ histo.html

Some of those errors are quite stupid other are probably less of a problem, following is a demonstration on one function (ceiling) http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html

Dear troll,
you are sadly mistaken.

you don't even have spreadsheet formulas spec'ed
  how did you come to this conclusion?
  Please read:
  http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormul a
  http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2006/11/the_formul a_iss.html

OOXML is just as open as ODF,
  RTFA

does more than ODF,
  Maybe. But, this is not necessarily a good thing. Actually, reading the article, is probably a bad thing. What are you referring to?

is faster to load than ODF, and has smaller file size than ODF.
  is it? There are many who come to opposite conclusions. And they do have numbers to back it up:
  http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/why-is-ooxml-s low.html

You lost, both on technical merits and in the marketplace.
  Don't think so. As we can see above, OOXML pretty much looks like crap to me.