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Plugins for Microsoft Office for OpenOffice Documents?
DeBaas asks: "We are all in favour of getting Open Standards in place so that we can happily use Open/Star/K Office or whatever without the nagging problem: The Microsoft Office users cannot read our files correctly.
Much of the focus is on providing filters to be able to make and read Microsoft Office files. However, should it not be the other way around, as well? Would it be feasible to make an open source project providing a plugin to MS office so that it can read and write in our preferred open format. Sort of a 'save as open document standard'. Is there a legal problem?, a technical problem? (is it already possible?) I would love it if I could send documents in OpenOffice knowing the other site can actually use and see it the way I meant to, even with MicroSoft Office."
VERY good idea.
Use Microsoft Security Holes to Auto-Install Open Source Replacements for Everyone.
This seems like a good idea initially, but if people can continue using MS Office to communicate with users of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, then what encouragement do they have to use the free/less expensive alternatives? I think that, while this might encourage a standard document format, it has the negative effect of encouraging MS Office use.
I hate to say this, but I think in this case the wise choice is to use MS's tactics against itself.
A solution to the problem with music today
M$ office users won't notice at all.
Not even remotely feasible. Probably technically possible, but utterly pointless. Now you not only have to have Word 2k5 installed, but you need to download some plugin from somewhere in order to read a .doc file you found on the net.
Hint: "Oh, this file is corrupted. *DELETE*" is the first thing that will occur to any normal windows user upon trying to read your "open .doc" file.
It's only worthwhile to make outputting perfectly M$-compliant word documents. Otherwise your interoperability = zero.
What's the point ?
Let the user install OpenOffice instead, no need for a plugin ....
RFC1925
It seems to be that, since Microsoft clearly doesn't want open document formats, that they would WANT to make thier products compatable with everybody else's, but not the other way around.
For MS, the perfect office suite would be a package that could read everything and saved in a format nobody else could read. Seems that this is kind if thing would help that along...
Can there be any guarantee that, if we give MS the ability to read OpenOffice files, that OpenOffice will always be able to access MSWord files?
=Smidge=
No, it should not.
Hope that helps!
I'd love to put openoffice on my machines in my somewhat large (and unnamed for the usual reasons) organisation. We've discussed it at the executive level, and the sole reason for staying with MSOffice is *other* organisations.
... eventually.
We rely on communicating with government, military and corporate entities, and their standard is Office. Period.
Whilst the import functions on openoffice are very good, they have to be (from a business critical aspect) absolutely 100% compatible -- and when you're dealing with multi-chapter doc files which use 90% of Word's capability, well, from my testings inhouse, I can't guarantee that level of accuracy. Images can move around, hide text, etc.
What I've done is start a different tactic within the organisation. All documents are PDF unless they require collaboration on the document. If collaboration is required, I'm now looking into a web-based solution (via our portal). Now, this does produce new challenges, but it does break the '.doc' monopoly.
Another damn important point is XML. With MSOffice moving towards their own XML, and with movement on producing an open standard for XML documents (slashdot article | actual link), this may be the approach that ends this problem. But it's going to be some time yet.
This is going to be a slow moving issue. I recommend we all relax, keep working on this, and slow and steady will win the race
Robert Anton Wilson
--that's one of the better "can't see the forest for the trees" bingo epiphanies I have read here on slashdot. Outstanding., Ya, it might slow down adoption for these other companies, but so what? Eventually they'll want to move on,more hardware and new software, by then they'll think "hey, might as well use the open stuff, makes mucho sense and cents to do so".
What I would really like is scientific journals to adopt a standard WYSIWYG open file format for text submissions.
Most accept MS Word, some exclusively. Some will accept LaTeX, but if you are are collaborating with people who are used to MS Word on MacOS and Windows (as most biologists are), this isn't a viable option.
If MS Word could read & write OpenOffice files reliably and the OpenOffice files format had all the features needed for authoring scientific manuscipts and grant proposals, this could be a huge step forward.
~Phillip
I'm afraid your solution seemed promising to me at one time as well, but it doesn't work. HTML is not a WYSIWYG language, it shouldn't be, and that's what is frequently needed in papers professional enough to hand in at work/college. And RTF doesn't render many things reliable from one application to another.
Most notably, I've found very serious table issues using when saving something as RTF from Word. Different versions of Word and Wordpad rendered it differently. Ultimately, the only solution for a reliable RTF that I've found is to stick with Wordpad entirely. Afraid that doesn't cut it when I need features found in Word simultaneously such as a self-generating table of contents/index/footnotes, complex page numbering, and so on. Further, RTF doesn't appear to have the capability to generate complicated table structures I need. (This is anectdotal -- I've never saved something complicated in RTF and had it preserved. I do not know for sure whether the format supports it, but the tools I use for it do not.)
Myself, I've only recently discovered OpenOffice.org due to the large amount of talk about it on Slashdot. I haven't used it much. Almost all of the writing I've needed to do lately has been hand, plain-text, or HTML.
But my girlfriend is a chemical engineer minoring in computer science. She didn't have the least bit of trouble with data structures. But she had never heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her recently. Her computer came with Microsoft Works which has interesting problems dealing with Microsoft Office. As such, she was restricted to doing most of her reports at school because her spreadsheets and reports didn't transfer well enough to justify the time of reformating. She hadn't heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her. At present, its ability to convert Microsoft Office documents has made her life easier.
Now here we have a relatively young person who is very technically proficient who could have benefited greatly from a product, but didn't for a long time because she didn't know. Do we see an advantage in increasing the visibility of this product in any fashion possible?
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Microsoft rapes you for $300 to get an office suite that isn't any better that free ones but was deliberately designed to be noninteroperable with any other office suite so that Microsoft could perpetuate their monopoly without any basis in merit. Why would any right-minded person use M$ office for any reason other than the fact that it is the only office suite that can work well with the (predominant) M$ office suite, and/or it came bundled with thier computers. Microsoft office is a ripoff and its current predominance has no basis in merit.
The DOJ settlement should have forced Microsoft to release all of their file formats and APIs to the public domain. Their only purpose in protecting them is to make it as difficult as possible for competing products interoperate with Micro$oft products.
Boycott Microsoft Office and support efforts to create completely interchangeable competitors to it.
Repeal the DMCA!
i think the best we can hope for is for from MS is a not too perversely convoluted XML file format. en lieu of an existing standard XML schema for office documents (that MS is willing to adopt), the ensuing MS word XML format will become the de facto standard, whether anyone likes it or not.
once this figurative pig has flown we should place our faith in some inspired individual or company to embrace the MS "standard", deconvolute and extend it, and submit it to the ISO.
i find it hard to believe that MS will go about implementing filters for other, virtually unheard-of word processor file formats. besides, it is better i think to have a single file format for any given file "type" and then to have many competing implementations of the application which uses it, aux HTML and browsers.
www.abisource.com can open and save as a .doc, usable by MSWord...
I always take every opportunity I can get to introduce free / open / SENSIBLE software to people who are not typically "tech" oriented, and who tend to fall into the M$ vortex fairly easily.
I have converted several non-tech people over to Open Office, and they like it BETTER. It is faster, and cheaper. On a side note, I've also been spreading the word of Mozilla (the average user DOES want to use cool features like tabbed browsing, no popups, image blocking, etc. You just have to take the 5 minutes necessary to sit down an d introduce the benefits to them.
I think it is high time, we all move above the Applications/OS wars. Instead of creating plugins for each application to go back and forth from each application formats, we should concentrate on the "Content Creation". When I use an Office Productivity Suite, my objective is to "Create Content", rather than make sure it works with apps from all vendors. But the sad reality is that, we are still involved in Application War.
I would prefer, that all the Office Productivity Suites, start supporting standard Document Models (DTDs/XSD) for content creation and management. DTDs like DocBook, WebSite etc. should be in all suites. Also Strict-XHTML suppport should be provided.
Offcourse this would no one would be able to monopolize the market by using obscure file format. But atleast this way, the war will move to "Content Creation" areas. Vendors will hopefull try to compete to include support for additional Document Models.
OpenOffice has it's own DTD, and I bet MS will soon implement its own DTD. This is now the right way to do things. They should work on to defining a standard DTD. But we all that is not going to happen. A happy medium would be to provide XSLTs to go from one DTD to another.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Ever try to update a docbook document that you exported to PDF?
Easy. Just go back to the document's DocBook source code, change it, and recompile it to PDF.
Will I retire or break 10K?
HTML is not a WYSIWYG language, it shouldn't be
HTML+CSS with paged media, on the other hand, comes very close, at least as close as RTF.
And RTF doesn't render many things reliable from one application to another.
Neither does .doc. It may screw up layout between computers with different fonts, different versions of a font, or different versions of Microsoft Word software. If you want to preserve the exact look of a page while sacrificing editability, use PDF. If you want to preserve editability, use something like LaTeX, DocBook, or HTML+CSS.
RTF doesn't appear to have the capability to generate complicated table structures I need.
Then use HTML+CSS instead. Heck, HTML export programs used to do layout with tables.
Will I retire or break 10K?
HTML sucks for printers. (Especially when it comes to page seperation )
HTML sucks, but the forthcoming CSS Paged Media won't.
Type a document in word, put 7 large images, save as .doc and as .rtf now compare the file sizes.
Now zip both files. If they're about the same size, you've found a solution to the problem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft also offers free readers for their office documents
Microsoft's Office document viewer programs are x86 only, and they run slowly if at all in Bochs on non-x86 architecture computers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let the user install
The user is not an administrator or "power user" and cannot run executables from C:\Documents and Settings. Now what?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The next version of MS Office will have the file format based around XML, this would be good as interpreting would be easy.
"no one would be able to monopolize the market by using obscure file format. But atleast this way, the war will move to "Content Creation" areas. Vendors will hopefull try to compete to include support for additional Document Models."
Well, sorry to say but this is the reason tha M$ using it's document format. They figured out a long time ago that once you get the majority market share that moving away from standards that implement interoperability ensures that if anyone wants to read the majority of document formats that they "must" buy the product that currently has the largest market share -- Just ask Corel.
Once M$ office/word got above the 50% point in share they started to implement their own version of document standards. It didn't take long before pretty much everyone was singing the M$ Office Suite tune.
We had our text format that were, and still are, the best possible representation of text, easily readable by both humans and programs (grep, awk, perl, erc.) -- they demanded features of their beloved MS Office and reading their Office files.
.doc format.
.doc format as good as one who does not have actual bugs from Microsoft code to include in his own one, can produce -- and now they have audacity to whine about results?
We made, just for their sorry asses (because we don't use such a thing by ourselves) all kinds of lightweight Office-style programs -- they demanded feature-by-feature equivalence even though most of them have no idea what those features are.
We achieved feature equivalence by creating horrendously bloated programs, almost as bloated as MS Office, and those things are still available for them for free -- they demanded compatibility with
We have made filters that produce
Did anyone try to understand how ridiculous the situation is now? There are perfectly usable, full replacements for MS Office programs, users can get them for free, developers can stick their code into them, everything works perfectly, and the very worst things that may happen are that MS Office will put wrong margin at the document exported from OpenOffice, or OpenOffice won't run MS Office virus.
WHAT THE [SKIPPED] DO THEY EXPECT NOW? That we will pay them for using our software? That OpenOffice will come with free version of MS Office, signed by Gates, and a box set of DVDs with all Ballmer's drunk dances and speeches? Or are they planning to pay Microsoft $300-$500 every two years until someone will get so fed up with this that he will blow up the Microsoft "campus" in Redmond?
This is absolutely ridiculous -- people that now demand complete compatibility with MS Office lost all traces of shame and decency, and if they have any they should just take our gift and shut up. Thanks are optional.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A few years ago, when WordPerfect was still on users' desktops (especially in the Federal government) and Groupwise *may* have been making inroads into the email market for business users; you *might* have had someone willing to continue to make interoperability at this level - the 'document' level; not the web - a project.
Now, you have yourself two war chiefs:
One, the advocate of open source. There are several reasons, mostly ideological I'm sure, that an open source programmer or office document workflow/application coder will not write this piece. I think one of them is that they will likely refuse to use Visual Basic for Applications for anything, even encapsulating their Perl or Javascript module into a VBA "application" to run as a macro on Office. Whether they know MS development environments or not; I doubt they'd do it. Most of them are deliberately avoiding MS development environments for any reasons like affordability, desire to not learn the GUI, or ethical reasons. I won't debate the loftiness or lack thereof of this choice at this point; that's not the purpose of my post.
The other group; the folks that develop applications with Microsoft tools, will simply find no reason to port OpenOffice documents to your Office97-OfficeXP or "11" suite. It's not going to make them money and/or their boss isn't going to ask for it. If they have users or consultants that do not use Office they will still request it in text, RTF, or optimally Word format. A huge number of IT recruiters will only accept resumes in Word format - even for UNIX and IBM mainframe jobs. If someone is writing anything other than email and they don't have the latest and greatest; I know a lot of support people that won't hesitate to drop Office 97 on the computer, at the very least until whatever 'standard' Office environment the company is using - 2000 or XP - can be brought in. A small clique of those are on SMS and have site licenses so they load it when someone asks for it.
All arguments for or against MS aside; unless it is a government office or small business with little means to acquire the software; I don't go many places where they aren't running at least Office 97 or MS Works. I set things up with older word processors or Open Office for a couple of home offices and such; but they call me a week later asking how much it will cost them for Office or if they buy a new computer can they get it included.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
You can download a word converter SDK from MS. The URL is here. "How to Obtain the WinWord Converter SDK (GC1039)"
I downloaded it a while back in hopes of starting an OOo converter in my copious free time, but haven't really looked at it; all disclaimers.
You can create pdf freely with the tandem Ghostscript/Ghostview. pdf is only a kind of zipped Postscript file. Take a look at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
Any Windoze user can print a pdf.
pdf's specs are freely available to anyone, that explains why pdf writer can exist beside Acrobat's own one.
All arguments for or against MS aside; unless it is a government office or small business with little means to acquire the software; I don't go many places where they aren't running at least Office 97 or MS Works. I set things up with older word processors or Open Office for a couple of home offices and such; but they call me a week later asking how much it will cost them for Office or if they buy a new computer can they get it included.
Did they actually have problems, or did they just get asked by someone if they have Microsoft Office, answered "no" because you did not explain them what OpenOffice is, and panicked? I guess, if they are going to buy a new computer just to use MS Office, it's your fault for not explaining what they are getting, not their.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I have relatives who send documents in the ever-so-evil MS Works 2000 format. Much to my surprise, MS Office 2000 does NOT read Works 2K docs naitively. Luckily, there is a patch you can download that adds support. But what's really cool... I noticed on my Linux box that Star Office 5.2 and OpenOffice both have builtin support for Works documents! For the first time, I have seen a feature that is *very* useful and not avalible in MS Office. It's features like this that will win the open source battle.
No, they come back and tell me they can't get anything done the way they want to; or are missing some feature or another; or do not want to learn a new Office suite. Rarely, but even still sometimes, they cannot share materials with other business the way they would like - or they can't take it home which is another thing. But that "compatibility" issue isn't as prevalent as the resistance to change, I think.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
No, they come back and tell me they can't get anything done the way they want to; or are missing some feature or another; or do not want to learn a new Office suite.
There is absolutely no learning involved.
Rarely, but even still sometimes, they cannot share materials with other business the way they would like
Translation: what I have said before -- someone asked them if they have MS Office and you forgot to tell them to say "yes"
or they can't take it home which is another thing.
WHAT???????? Of course, they can take OpenOffice home. It's free.
But that "compatibility" issue isn't as prevalent as the resistance to change, I think.
There is no change that they will see. The only problem is that you haven't explained it to them -- but then if they actually worked with OpenOffice and then asked for another computer with MS Office, it would be absolutely pointless, therefore I think that either:
Either is your fault.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Actually, I tell all my friends, acquaintances and any customers a lot about a lot of things - several of them choose not to hear it. If someone has something they have been working with for a long time; they tend to resist change - even if it's free. I have just stated that I have observed this.
HOWEVER - I'm not a flaming-sword waving anti-corporate, anti-MS, anti-paying-for-software anything. If someone's amenable to something and I have a solution for it, voila. I'm looking right now for something other than Paint Shop Pro v7 for someone because I remember my version 5 being $99 and I know they don't have $99 to spend.
So whether it's my fault or not is flying f**k, rolling doughnut. Any more questions?
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Now you have shown your true face -- accusing me in all kinds of sins ("flaming-sword waving anti-corporate, anti-MS, anti-paying-for-software anything") that FUD is made of, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the matter discussed.
Therefore you are either a FUDmeister from Microsoft, or a pawn in its game -- in either case your "customers' problems" can be dismissed as Microsoft propaganda. Shut up.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
No, you are accusing me like the elitist snob you pretend to be. As I said, flying fuck, rolling doughnut.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.