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MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility
Anonymous Coward writes "Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools, in the mean time Hal Varian (of Berkeley) has conducted the Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment which shows a surprising amount of interoperability. Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"
That's what slashdat needs. Spalling is not "compatable" with nerdness. At least the British are coherent in their massacring of the latin vowels.
It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs
;o)
Sad but true
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
"Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"
New version of what? The Microsoft or the OpenOffice?
If OpenOffice, is there something wrong with it? Please, tell me, why shouldn't I upgrade?!
Whatever they do, someone will always find a way round it, it may take time, but it will happen.
IT nice to see a current state of the market however I have to wonder out of those that are unusable do any include some major functions that most people use. IT would be nice to have the way things are broken to be quantified a bit more
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
that the new gtk+2 version of Abiword is not out yet. It would have fared much better. I am sure it is the same for Gnumeric. I hope they will repeat this test once they come out, I use cvs versions of both of these and imho they beat OOo in almost every department, be it looks, speed or ease of use. OOo does have slightly better MS Office compatibility, but not by much.
Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!
I use word processors to write school papers. When it comes down to it, writing a school paper requires one important feature, spell check. That was available on the C64. I'll bet most people are like me in that they NEVER need to upgrade (no, I don't have the trusty C64 anymore, but I haven't upgraded office since 97).
You really have to hand it to the Microsoft marketing dept for making everyone believe they need to upgrade every year.
----
Squirrel
...compatible (only) with Microsoft Paper XP
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
Right there is where most problems will occur. Also, after reading enough of /., lack of support of VBScript would be another obstacle.
Also, I wonder how KOffice will do after they switch their file formats and stuff. It could only help, right?
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Compatability
As they say themselves, this was based on files downloaded from the Internet, which were probably designed in order to be viewed by the greatest number of people.
Hmmm... Then again, putting MS Office files on the Internet, instead of PDF of plain HTML probably means the user do not have enough computer knowledge to optimize said files. So, it's a good point.
On the other hand, I am surprised that the numbers for StarOffice are greater than the numbers for OpenOffice... How come?
Anyway, this is good news, and should be a valuable lesson for most people with PHBs... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What I don't understand by this is that under the US anti-trust settlement, Microsoft were made to release the specifications of their communication protocols to competitors.
Clearly, the intention of this settlement wasn't so that everyone could simply see what's in, for example, a word document (which is a communication protocol in itself), but how to build program which interoperate with them. Shouldn't the developers of Open Office then be able to simply download the DOC specs off of Microsoft.com and build it into their system? Or, am I assuming that the "settlement" was an actual binding agreement?
Word 97 is a perfectly adequate word processor. So was Word 95 for that matter.
Word 2004 can't be many lines of code from self-awareness.
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
Clever marketing and PHB one-upmanship are what convinced the masses to go with this ridiculous and unnecessary upgrade path.
Operating Systems progressing through research and improved hardware I can understand; but you DO NOT need a new version of a bleedin' word processor every year.
... Not upgrading isn't an option for a lot of people. They simply get a computer either preconfigured through their IS department, or preconfigured by Dell or Gateway.
As soon as 'the boss' is unable to open your budget report written in OpenOffice, guess what he'll demand from you..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
We have a mixed office, with most users running MS-Office and (mainly) the developers running OpenOffice.org.
Most of the problems are with word document are with imbedded graphics. Sometimes they show up in funny places. Sometimes not at all.
Large spreadsheets can be a problem (export from something). OOo has a limit at 32000 rows, it does give a nice warning about it, thought.
Haven't had any problems with powerpoint presentations.
If I could get the rest of the house to spend the time to learn to use OOo, MS-Office would be dumped in a second.
One thing is sure - we will not be buying new Ms-Office licences (but as we have already payed for those we have, I'll not be forcing something new on exsisting users, when it isn't nessesary).
TC - My Photos..
"Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools"
Microsoft may soon be blocking office compatibility with ANY productivity tools. They don't care whether the source is open or closed, just that it is not a Microsoft product.
While this is true, there is MS's movement towards XML support in the top brackets (Pro and above), which should prove VERY compatible with applications when proper support is implemented. Of course, the home, and small bus. editions are going to suffer, but then again - MS office holds a nice share of the market, why give up this oppertunity to put pressure on other developers and help maintain window's market dominance (which fits perfectly with MS removing Office from mac)
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
It's the PHB's which cause lock in, not the technically adept admins. Your PHB gets shiny new laptop with shiny new MS Office all pre-installed they write some inane bullshit about something irrelevant and mail it to everyone under the sun utterly oblivious to the fact that there is such a thing as a file format.
Because PHB is their boss the rest of corporate minions now have to upgrade to the shiny new locked up tighter than a virgin's snatch version of Office in order to read the irrelevant inane bullshit.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This more or less confirms my experiences I've had with MS Office -> OpenOffice interoperability in everyday use. While using Windows at work, I use Linux at home, and so far I've only had minor issues moving between the two worlds. So what's the deal about the story?
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
You really should care if you can log in via LDAP in a Windows AD; or if you can share a file betweens different OSs, or be able to map a network drive.. but file formats ?
If you want to send anything to outside your organization, send if in PDF format. Its portable and "write-protected".
And inside your organization, for sure someone already has ditacted a office package as "the standart". If it is Windows Office, KOffice or StarOffice, it doesn't matter, because everybody will use the same product.
If you get some of this files from outside, just use one of the many converters available around.
The problem with the Linux Office packages is simply one:
Everybody that already worked 2 days with a computer knows how to work with MS word, MS powerpoint and MS excel. Switching to another office package is seen as a dificult task, because the interface is always diferent.
My 2euros (cents dont buy you anything these days)
Micro$oft is not going to simply say "Hey .. here is a free / opensource version of a comparable product to our office if you cannot afford it"
/Windows Sale. Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves.
No, I think that they will keep there advertising campaign going and offering the likes of MS Works as the alternative to their more expensive package. And how many basic system users do you know of that have been following the development of OpenOffice ??
The average user walks into a computer store and says "I need a computer to type letters / send mail / basic calculations", and I can almost guarantee that the salesman will make an MS Office
an academic report backing real-world experience!
Although it must be said that this study is *quite basic*. The authors, to be fair, do point out however that "This particular experiment should be considered a pilot study that could be extended to a larger one.
Our experience in the 'real' world is exactly the same - compatiblity, for the most part, is *good enough*.
We have been rolling out small pilots with a number of clients using exactly this line of reasoning. For many IT departments who have lived through the *gratuitous incompatibilities* between succesive generations of Microsoft Office, this is all that is required to evaluate alternatives.
Yes, we should strive for 'perfect' interoperability. No, it is not necessary to begin migrating real businesses to an Open Source desktop.
Just my 0.02!
What Microsoft is about to do, is to introduce an enourmously complex, ill-documented format. Just wait'n'see.
Don't forget incompatibility between formats used in some of their different MS Office versions.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
What is really missing from the chart is statistics on MS Office :) I want to see Office 2003, Office 2002, Office ... 97 on that chart, and see how well each of them handles this 'random' sample of office files. Forwards compatibility is almost non-existent, and backwards compatibility is much more broken than you would think. I think Star Office and Open Office might actually beat MS Office * in that scoring methodology.
One of my engineers switched to StarOffice a few months ago and nobody noticed until he told us. His documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and emails all open fine on our PC's with Office, and he reports no problems reading the stuff we send him. He gets lots of PowerPoints from vendors and reports no problems there, either. So it's good enough for routine office-type use. Serious tech writers don't use Office anyway, so minor glitches with table formats are not likely to work their way into formal product documentation.
The article said: It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs, as forward compatibility has often been a problem. We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them.
It's a pity they didn't include a couple versions of Microsoft Office in the comparison, so that this effect could actually be measured rather than relegated to a footnote.
Word and Excel are fine in Office 97, but Outlook is not. Outlook 97 sucks, and Microsoft had to release Outlook 98 upgrade free for Outlook 97 users. There is still room for improvement even for Outlook XP, you will see some cool stuff in Outlook 2003.
Why is being able to use the brand spanking new version of MS Office so damned important? I would think that OpenOffice would have 99.9% of the functionality that 99.9% of the users require by now.
Does everything include nothing?
In fact, 6.1 seems a nice product generally and is the first version of SO that I think I can actually recommend to clients when it is released. It may even be possible to train users to export PDFs for email, which would be a big win.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves.
They have: StarOffice.
Apart from the arguments already made above, there is another argument: If you save a file to csv, html, or whatever, you *lose* information.
My information is mine, Microsoft prevents me from exporting my data from its closed formats, that's vendor lock-in.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Although this is an informal experiment, it should be pointed out that it has an important flaw: the assumption that the documents will be displayed in MS Office perfectly. I would not at all be surprised if a number of the documents have at least layout problems in the first place.
Beside attempting to do table formatting with strings of spaces {I know this is acceptable, even encouraged, in programming, when monospaced fonts are used; but it totally breaks proportional spacing}, the author also had manually numbered the pages.
I was heavily tempted to refuse to do the editing on the grounds that (a) the original material was unfit to use as a starting point and (b) I was having difficulty finding a copy of MS Word.
And now, the point, part one. What I'm really looking for is a word processor that can take such childish attempts and format them properly. Work out where the author was trying to line up the tabs, and change the space-spaced stuff to proper tabbed columns.
Or, maybe someone could make a USB shotgun accessory that will blow a luser's head off if they try certain effects. Such as
- Attempting to format using spaces
- Attempting to generate page numbers, tables of contents, or anything else that the computer can do for you, by hand *
- Using more than three fonts in a document
- Using the font 'comic sans MS' for anything at all
The point, part two, is that WordPad is not a word processor. It does not incorporate a spelling checker. Whose priorities are so warped that they would omit such a basic necessity while incorporating changeable fonts and colours? It matters not what meretricious decorations are applied to the text if the spelling is all cocked up! It does not even qualify as a text editor; it is a viewing tool. And a poor one at that, because its output often does not resemble the output of Word.* I have actually heard of someone creating a spreadsheet, then adding up the figures with an idiot-calculator and entering this in the total box
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them.
The only version of Office that is called Office 98 is for MacOS, as far as I know. For Windows the more recent versions are 95, 97, 2000 and XP.
It is also very interesting to see the difficulties for Microsoft's Office suite when it comes to the interoperabilities between Office 97 on Windows and Office 98 on MacOS. At a company I worked at in 1998, we had both Macs and Windows machines, and amazingly enough, it was not trivial to make some documents written in Office 97 on a Windows machine work in Office 98 on a Mac (and vice versa).
Consider: You're in Mega Corporation and you're running Office 97. One day, the guys running XP with the latest Office pre-installed start sending you Word and Excel files. It doesn't matter that these documents use none of the new Office features, and may even use the same file format: your Office 97 doesn't recognize them, and you can't do your work any more. So, you shell out for the newest Office. And then, of course, everyone you send your documents to has to upgrade as well.
God, what a racket! Why anyone in his right mind does business with MS is beyond me: you wind up so screwed.
[this
What I really would like to see was, if they'd tested Microsoft Office as well. By that I mean, they should try opening the same documents in, say, Office 97 and test it the exact same way as the others.
The article does mention that, but I reckon most readers will just look at the table and say "I need 100% - I'll take MS office"
No really, no. If competition was active, the document format wouldn't matter -people would simply choose the suit which best suited their needs (price, performance, features etc...) Instead, because Microsoft can rely on the DOC format lockin' people are pretty much forced to use it if they want to communicate with anyone else.
And this "idea" of packaging OO.org software opposed to Office in new computers simply won't cut it. Though it seems plausible to us, for those in the know, i.e. those that sign the software contracts with Microsoft, know that -shall I say- "clauses" prevents this from ever happening (the IBM, OS/2 Warp, Win95 on the new aptivas highlights the fact).
Just set up a central server at your company running MS Office + An HTTP server. Write a backend so that employees can use the web interface to convert a file. Can't be too hard can it?
Or even, scan incoming/outgoing emails for protected files, and run them through it.
Still ends up a lot cheaper than a site license for MS office. Dunno how Microshaft would feel about it though?
What was tested here was how well different office suites could READ documents that were (most likely) produced with MS Office (since MS Office has a 9x% market share, and it's unlikely that you generate .doc for web dissemination if you're using Open Office).
Unfortunately, this tells us very little about interoperability, as needed in an office/colaboration environment, where people need to read my files and my revisions to their files.
Just to read other people's files, I prefer a format like PDF anyways.
"We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them."
Office 98 - Mac only?
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
I recall that Microsoft's Mac OS software division recently had a contest called "Ms. MoXie". I hope this guy doesn't get sued ;) (For info on this past event, see this page.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It goes both ways. I just received a document from a Korean gentleman, in HWP format. How fun was that to make work! Found a free webbrowser plugin(!) to view it with an HTML wrapper page to set the mimetype correctly. Give me PDF or RTF anyday...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I wonder that a study made in January 2003 is only published in August! In the meanwhile OpenOffice (1.1rc3) has improved a lot, StarOffice 6.1beta is available. The experiment should be redone soon.
MS XML is designed to be incompatible. You can save in two version
1)With tags and binary information in the same file - it looks like RTF
2)with only the information in the file. If you had an XSLT document you could easily translate it to other forms of XML. However, you don't, you won't, unless you build it yourself. MS doesn't save, doesn't provide it.
Have Fun
Why do poeple even bother testing those things? Most ./'s know that there are better alteratives out there.....
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
.DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Microsoft has offered free (as in beer) viewers for quite a while now.
My bet is the latest 1.1 release of OpenOffice.org will have better compatibility than Off97 or Off for Mac.
Cheers
VikingBrad
While testing anti-aliased unicode fonts for plan9
p e/ ' | tr -d ' '
echo ' http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/freety
I used Word97 to make my XP fonts big and it didn't display them with anti-aliasing.
Now that's a comprehensive test
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Interestingly, Dell offers a non-MS product (WordPerfect) as its "default" choice when purchasing a new system, so that's an extremely large retailer that's offering an Office alternative. Granted, I would imagine this just generates more money for them as most consumers that are actually paying attention will opt to "upgrade" to an MS based product.
I'd like to think this is a sign of room for alternatives in the market place, but it's hard to give a lot of credit for offering a Corel product as that alternative.
- b
Looking at the GNOME Office components, really old versions of both AbiWord and Gnumeric, and Agnubis, which is to all intents and purposes defunct.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Standards mean, literally: "Me". "What I'm using." "Send me what I use."
The world isn't broken up into entities who've agreed to communicate via pdf when standards fail or or sabatoged. The world is composed of "Me's" who want documents they can read. And Microsoft has fabricated artificial barriers to the decoding of these documents so they can charge a fee for providing a "solution"
These barriers have been going up year after year like clockwork. Thinly disguised extortion but obviously thick enough for some.
Random documents on the net do not necessarily correspond to documents used internally.
It would be interesting to see how the non-MS products coped with semi-embedded documents which are references to network shares.
Office isn't 4 disparate applications it is an application framework that happens to have some pre-configured applications.
There might be an application you know as Word but it is quite happy to live as an ActiveX control instatiated in your IIS Application.
I used to use it as a report generator, fill in some web forms and out spits the documentation.
The ability to open every word document on the planet is only part of the journey.
Sad but troo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
And also people for being so gullible as to either be born wanting the new version of absolutely or to be hoodwinked so easily. It's not just the software industry where people are so easily fooled - the fuss over new registration cars etc is just one of many examples of human gullability. (Cynicism hat off)
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
That isn't lock-in, that is someone sending you a file in a format you don't like. I've had people send me files in PDF when I needed a Word file, but that isn't lock-in either. If you are hired by a person or company to do a job, you need to make sure you accommodate them, and that includes using whatever they want for file (within reason). If they send you something in Word, you use Word because that is what the customer wants, not because MS has somehow now mysteriously "locked you into" Word. It's not MS's fault that someone you deal with uses Word and you don't want to. That's not lock-in, that's you now liking how businesses operate.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
yes microsoft spent years trying to improve compatibility between programs so that excel spreadsheets could end up in word docs and so forth, after all isnt that one of the reasons explorer had to be appart of the operating system?- so that things would work together.
Now they almost got compatibility right, and now also everyone else has got it right they have to bar the compatibility with their own tools. Very humorous. I wonder how many software patents they will try to push with respect to word to prevent competitors.
humorous humanity
Quote from the public comments on the revised proposal to final judgement:
373. However, the major comments concerning file formats request disclosure of the file formats of Microsoft products such as Office. Office does not meet the definition of Microsoft Middleware, and so it does not fall under Section III.D. Nor is Office implemented natively in a Windows Operating System Product, so it does not fall under Section III.E. Thus, the file formats for Office will not be disclosed or licensed pursuant to the RPFJ.
Paragraphs 371-375 on the page contain more information about it but that's the main point.
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Are password protected files supported in any free office application?
.xls files with OpenOffice 1.0, but then again it could be he was just too stupid to enter the correct password ;)
I think my father once had problems with opening password protected
The latest release candidate from OO.o does a fine job of exporting to PDF. It's handled all the different Office files I've thrown at it with ease and panache.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Are you saying that you consider losing format, when converting from XLS to CSV vendor lock-in???
Hell! CSV does not support formatting, formulas etc... It's not a matter of strategy it's a matter of capacity
May I use your sig please?
What would have made the article truly compelling would have been to also have compared things like Wordperfect and even MS Office itself. I haven't seen quite the same comparison of word processors or office suites in years, like 6 or 7. If Star Office and Open Office meet or exceed the compatibility of the commercial alternatives, that's a huge step.
Many businesses are petrified to move from MS Office and Windows but won't look for themselves at alternatives. They believe what they see in print and a comparison like that includes other commercial suites as well as MS Office would be very compelling. Most of you have heard things like "well, PC Magazine says if I snort onions through my none, Windows won't crash as much" and they just believe it and might even do it because they read it somewhere.
I don't think MS Office would achieve a 100 in any category either. Just from the font issues that crop up, formating issues, use by one person of a feature that another doesn't have installed, etc., would keep it down to 97-99 range also most likely. But it needs to be seen in print.
TextMaker promises "to seamlessly read and write Microsoft Word documents" but I haven't heard anybody's experiences with it. Has anybody here tried it?
Karma. Moderation. Is my
When I'm in a position like that I'm thankful everyone can read RTF. Its not feature rich, but it works for just about anyone. Also its becoming a de facto rule to make any 'fancy' document a PDF anyway. Personally, I prefer PDFs for something that isn't supposed to be edited by anyone else. I can pull this trick off because I can make PDFs free with PDF995, Open Office, or in Linux. Way too many people assume it will cost them $250 for the power of making a pdf and Adobe isn't quick to correct them.
Not to mention the office copier at my only client site is Red Hat based and will take a scanned copy and email you a PDF. Very handy.
What I'm very curious about is will MS make Word be able to open sxw files by default? Perhaps when OO hits critical mass? Something tells me sxw support, if it comes, will be in some hard to find converter pack that asks you for your original office CD.
I have successfuly deployed OpenOffice at several of my clients' and they seldom complain about having problems with MS Office files. A little training did the trick and they're very happy with it now. Furthermore, it seems their contacts (who use MS) have less trouble (if at all) opening .doc or .xls files produced by OpenOffice than ones made with various versions of MS Office.
Now, we just need to squash a few annoying bugs (like the print preview in the spreadsheet module, still not fixed in 1.1rc3), make a native OS X build and we got a free, open-source, efficient cross-platform office suite that works, no matter the OS it's running on, with a consistent UI. Hey, Netscape got popular back in the days also because it was available on all platforms...
Furthermore, the openoffice file format is so easy and straightforward (just zipped XML) it could just become the ideal ubiquitous file format we're looking for. Btw, I wonder why no other open-source office application can read and/or write it. Shouldn't be hard writing an import/export filter...
Just my 2 cents there...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Is MS Works compatabible with Word? I've never used it, but I'd heard that it used a different file format. Can OpenOffice read MS Works files? What features does MS Works offer, compared to Office and OpenOffice? Does it have an Impress equivalent?
unprecedented evile vs. hobbyist dogooders?
no contest. those foulcurrs best get ready to see the light.
software is software. if you have to sign some payper liesense hostage ransom contract, in order to find that your system must, buy mandate, be rendered incompatible with the rest of the kode on the planet, what's the poiNT? whois to benefit?
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. vote with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. that's the spirit.
the daze of the phonIE georgewellian fuddite/walking dead stock markup execrable are #ed.
for each & every harmed innocent, there is a badtoll. it must/will be repaid by you/us, as the felonious wons will not be available to make reparations.
the lights are coming up now. lookout bullow.
I think what would be most beneficial is that file formats were chosen and made 'standard' or given to an ANSI/ISO type board. Programs, whether closed or open, could then compete on features, stability, performance, low-resource usage, etc. and there would be far less lock in, which is unfair and uncompetitive.
HAL R. VARIAN is a professor of information management, economics, and business at the University of California at Berkeley. He works on the economics of information technology.
:-)
CHRISTOPHER M. VARIAN is 16 years old and does not yet have a biography, although he is looking forward to acquiring one.
I have a life. I really do. I've just chosen to ignore it.
Every time I propose even a piece of freeware, the bosses don't want anything to do with it. The logic behind their decision is simply that if something really important were lost because of a program glitch or flaw, we might be legally liable. I have yet to come up with an adequate response. Any suggestions?
Home users typically don't care about VB macros. For companies, it's different.
There must be thousands of little "business applications" that are Word or Excel macros. Each of those might contain only a few lines of code, but in a large organization, there are a lot of those.
WWTTD?
You also have the problem of evolving file formats. Take the .doc format for example. This file format has continued to change and the only time us poor old users find out is when we can't read a document or it "seems wrong". The whole thing is undocumented and the world is forced to upgrade as newer versions of .doc files are propogated.
Personally, I was happy with Word 6.0. From my perspective, Word 95 added long file names, Word 97 added incompatibilites, Word 2000 attempted to fix them and Word XP does away with MDI. I don't need anything newer than Word 95, but have to use Word 2000 because of incompatible .doc files.
That's really good. No more compatibilty issues to worry about and the open source folks can now actually concentrate on their product and not mimic MS office suites.
:)
After they've blocked the compatibility two opposite forces will act:
1) People will stop migrating to Linux because all of their old data will become inaccessible.
2) The current Linux and Windows users, both, who need to exchange data - will start pressing for a common open file format.
Let's see which camp wins
Nandz.
I have to disagree with the office interoperability results as applicable to all. As an academic at a university, I find that most Word or PowerPoint presentations I open with StarOffice or OpenOffice are unusable since equations are powerly loaded. Sure, StarOffice and OpenOffice may work on 93% of documents but I'm guessing these are mostly memos or simple papers.
For us in the scientific community, until equations are imported with a higher accuracy I would have to put the interoperability more at 50% then in the 90 percentile range. The testing really needs to indicate where things failed and why. Perhaps that will focus the StarOffice and OpenOffice developers on some important points where interoperability is lacking.
I have been using Linux on my desktop for the past few months, & I did a similar compatibility study of my own, and I really feel, be it Open Office, Star Office, or AbiWord, they all lack badly in compatibility, much more than this study would like me & u to believe. Apart from compatibility, another majoy issue is stability. OOo and Star Office used to crash atleast once a day which is a sad state of affairs. /. community feel about the use of Office over WINE as a long-term solution?
After all these experiences with the above products, I switched to using MS Office XP on Wine and except for speed, in all other aspects I feel this option scores over all others.
What does the
Argh!
Why is the "Anonymous Coward"-link pointing to www.acmqueue.org?
Macro code and applications targeted to the platform are a major impediment to moving from MS Office. It seems obvious that you need it in Excel -- after all, it's just extending the spreadsheet formulas, but while there's only a few macros/apps we've created in PowerPoint, automation of Word is almost a neccessity.
The number of Word features we change, replace or enhance is enormous: "Wizards" to guide creation of tables with their captions, startup items to ensure option settings, repair commands to fix things when you've messed up your own document, etc. etc.
Without at least source compatability with VBA and the object models, moving to any other platform would be a tremendous undertaking. We did it 8 years ago from WP to Word '95 (and to a lesser extent from Word '95 to Word 2000 four years ago), and we don't want to start from scratch.
Design for Use, not Construction!
is no longer a part of my system, though all my workstations are Windows 2000 (no XP for me, thank you M$), backed up by a RedHat 8 server setup running s/w RAID5 and samba. OpenOffice has taken over, though I haven't had much opportunity to use it yet (school hasn't been demanding papers...yet), I find it far superior tyo M$ Office, yes it has bugs, fortunatly there's an entire team of Devs with RAID cans in hand squashing more every day. PDF integration beats the hell out of distributing raw .DOC and .XLS files (which my BusTech classes 2 years ago insisted on doing for distribution (running M$ Office 2k under 98 or 2k), now the same department is considering going to a redHat powered L.T.S.P setup running open office (w00t).
Inter-organzation distibution via DOC, and XLS et. al. is the worst idea ever, since not everyone runs OXP, O2k or O2k3, usually a combination thereof within the same office just becase they got new boxe with OXP and their old ones came with O2k, I still get the occasional call about interoptibility failures... oy.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
Because every "analysis" these days are not worth the pixels on the screen. They're just out to get a result. It would be easy to include several MS Office versions in the test, and REALLY generate some interesting numbers. How can you compare anything when you don't have MS Office itself as a reference point?
But no, they were just interested in one thing, and the test concludes with what they were aiming at when they started.
Shoddy, useless and not interesting at all. Where are the people with some clue these days?
This is the question I want to ask Microsoft:
Have you ever seen a hand written letter made by a pen of type X that was not readable or adjustable by someone owning a pen of type Y?
What I'm trying to say is that the times of closed doc. formats is over. Doc. processors have become a standard tool in this world, we can't efford anymore to have just one company making pens.
DTD the damn format and send it into the world. SOBs.
Commodore 64 had the GEOS desktop which did have a word processor with proportional fonts.
The thread focuses a lot on the Office suite which is clearly critical, but there are several other very necessary features for Linux compatibility.
m l
i bi lity.html
Rather than copy the whole page. Here is a good summary of some of the critical pieces and how one of the Linux desktop vendors goes about meeting them:
http://www.xandros.com/windowscompatibility2.ht
Here is another of a bit more contentious nature:
http://www.xandros.com/windowsapplicationcompat
Hunger is the best sauce.
Recently I was assigned to put several Word documents on my employer's website. I used the latest Office version (XP) to convert those files to HTML. The result? Horribly broken set of HTML files, unfit for inner distribution - not to mention publishing online. The simplest parts of the documents were converted with acceptable success: the HTML code generated was awkward and terrifically bloated, but usually rendered OK on common browsers. But the more sophisticated stuff (tables, footnotes, bookmarks) was not only broken itself - it also broke the rendering and generally messed up the more simple parts of the document.
In the end we just converted them all to PDF with Adobe Acrobat 5. Went OK.
A long time ago they could implicitly force everyone to upgrade because each version had useful new functionality. But that ceased a long time ago, whats new that would make me want to upgrade, clippy 2?
Now they're mad because everyone isnt upgrading.
They have no new useful functionality and now they want to lock everyone in with DRM? They realized that everyone is catching up and they need to lock everyone in ASAP. too late boys, you had your chance.
They realize it themselves, there is just nothing they can do with word (and the rest of their product line) to make it more compelling. End of the road, dead, finished.
Please no. RTF is the format from hell. All existing readers interpret it differently (which is easy to understand if you have looked at the format itself). Give us a simple XML-based format please?
Sheesh. Two completely misleading stories in a row on this topic.
The "new" format is not the default. You must specifically say "I want to encrypt this document." Nobody is going to use this crap, just like nobody uses it with the Media Player format.
Stop getting yourselves all worked up over absolutely nothing. People are actually starting to believe this pseudo-journalistic crap about Office being spewed on slashdot.
What's the matter? Can't fight MS on the merits? Do you really have to stoop this low to win over a few OOo converts? Pathetic.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Yeah man!
I used to get that problem myself. Always those brown lines in my shorts.
Eventually, I learned to wipe my ass properly.
p.s. you're hopeless as a troll.
why wouldn't you upgrade? office 2003 will let you save and load xml formatted documents. they're even publishing their schema.
whitepaper
i've used the betas, i've seen it work. it's not a proprietary binary stream wrapped in xml headers - it's a fully ascii, 100% fidelity xml represented word document. with schema.
the binary formats always change every major version. it's doubtfully due simply to malice, it's more likely due to increased business pressure to cram more features in.
but all that aside, compatibility is the primary reason to upgrade to 2003.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I think that a great potential project for OpenOffice would be to produce standalone filtering programs like those included with NetPBM. If there were doc2oo and oo2doc programs (xls2oo, etc.), every other package that wanted to support MS Office or any other formats supported by OpenOffice could simply support the OpenOffice format, and call the OpenOffice filters on import or export. It would also be great for batch conversions.
However we would be much better off trying to improve the stability of the existing applications, rather than trying to catch up with the level of functionality of the proprietary competitors. Go easy on the new features (exporting to PDF is a great idea, though); concentrate on enhancing the stability of OOo, KOffice, Abiword and so on; enhancing/debugging the import/export filters is an important point as well.
This point has already been made, it needs to be repeated time and time again... Just my 2 cents anyway.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
This stream of "office interoperability" articles here on Slasdot is FUD. Sorry, but that's just how it is.
Having been using Office 2003 for quite a while, I must say it does have quite a few very interesting advances. DRM is just a tiny portion of the entire thing and really not worth blabbling about. DRM allows you just that - distribute docs so that they have limited distribution rights. It comes as a plugin that is downloaded from Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if the plugin can be used in other applications.
Unfortunately, OpenOffice will need to do some major catching up very soon.
And no, I am a Linux user most of the time, and I use OpenOffice most of the time during my daily work. I love it and I wouldn't trade my RedHat workstation for anything else.
A lot of my work revolves around integrating existing systems with Office applications, ie. generating spreadsheets with live financial numbers, generating documents with preinserted addresses etc.
To do this I need to do application integration. The COM-interfaces of Office-applications are (albeit maybe not completely) documented, and they are relatively backwards-compatible. This is where I, a professional, earn my money, and where my customers, real life businesses, benefit from interoperability between systems.
Excellent point. I deal with several companies since we are a Health Care Provider. Almost EVERYTHING that comes from these vendors, etc is in the latest greatest MS Word, or Excel format. End-users arent always the brightest stars in the sky when it comes to software, but neither are 3rd party vendors.
Which raises the question - if you pay a vendor for updates, information, etc.... should they be required to send it in a "unlocked" format? Or at least a openly accepted format that all systems can read?
MS Office aside - Pennsylvania's Department of Health now REQUIRES you to use IE 5.5 or better to do MANDATORY submissions to them as of the end of August. It doesnt matter what browser you use, or how compatible it is - they wont work with anything else. So basically - if any healthcare organization based in PA wanted to move to Linux, they can't. After all - MicroSnot isn't ever going to do a browser for anything other than themselves in the future.
And to think.. there are still people who think they aren't a monopoly, or that the government put an end to it.
I used to use MS Word a lot, really a lot, and used and taught most features. A few times, there were flat out incompatibilities between formats for different versions which either required waiting for a patch / filter or else saving in an intermediate file format using the old program. Even when it was possible to open an older version in a newer version or vice-versa, small things like metadata, some layout, or language settings disappeared.
Missing the metadata give obvious problems. Missing the language settings, especially in a multi-lingual document, can really come back to bite you: it spell checks great, but still contains errors which either your client or your professor spot the first time they read your final draft.
Word 2.0c was the crossover. After that more things got worse than were getting better. For an easy to use word processor with room for improvement, OpenOffice.org already has MS-Office beat. XML compliance with a publicly documented schema is reason enough by itself.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!
Personally, I intend to upgrade to the new version as soon as the 1.1 final is released.
You did mean the new version of OpenOffice.org, didn't you?
- Blah blah blah, missing scientist. Blah blah blah, atomic bomb. -
I've had this one out several times with my kids on their school reports. Their first instinct is to make things look pretty on the page - using spaces and the enter key. I've told them to just type in the content, and THEN we'll go after formatting.
Some of the time they even listen. Most of the time now they pretty much do this stuff on their own, so I don't know how they're doing it. When they ask for help, I get my opinion noted.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Okay, I posted this in the other story about this, but here it goes again....
OFFICE 2003 DOES NOT BLOCK ACCESS FROM OPENOFFICE UNLESS THE USER TELLS IT TO!!!!
FFS, RTFA next time, people! Not only does the user have to tell Office2k3 to implement DRM and jumble the format, but there has to be a Win2k3 server on the network running the DRM manager application.
In order to use IRM (Information Rights Management), according to the article, the customer has to spend boatloads of money.
This feature is not about closing off office applications. It's about protecting IP and controlling access. M$ isn't selling O2K3 on the basis of "Hey, it's not compatible with other applications and that's why you should buy it!" They're selling it on "Hey, you can control who gets to read, print, and modify your documents, and that's why you should buy it!"
It has nothing to do with OSS, FOSS, Slashdot, or anything else. It's just a feature they want to sell to the intellectually paranoid at an extremely high price.
For the second time, there is nothing to see here, MOVE ALONG...
I was under the impression that SO is willing to use licensed code, where OO must all be open source. I also seem to remember hearing that import/export filters were some of the places they used licensed code, as opposed to 'core' code.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves."
Then why don't _you_ start a business? OpenOffice is GPL, isn't it?
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
If this person would re-run this test with the latest Abiword and Gnumeric beta releases (which by the way are releasing the stable versions of both in 3 days), they would see that both applications have as good or better MS Office file compatibility as compared to Star and Open Office. I haven't touched Microsoft Word nor OO in over a year and have been able to open, modify and save all Microsoft Word files sent to me (and this was running with the development versions of Abiword!). Check it out...if not for anything else than the fact that Abiword is a lightning fast application.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
It would then be desirable to be able to use this as part of my Perl, PHP, C, Java, and Python programs which I have to run a lot at work. That way I can, for instance, write custom forms to input timesheets, generate the timesheets on the fly as *.xls, store them to disk, send them via email, and generally decrease the amount of time it takes to get common clerical tasks completed for the employees, and (hopefully) they'd better spend the 5-10 minutes a week we saved by... I dunno... working.
If there's any tools out there that do this already, and I've just missed the boat (or several), I'd love to know. But if there's nothing out there, I'd love to do it myself. It's the doing that gives me pause. ;)
How come Hancom Office (http://en.hancom.com/index.html) wasn't included in this discussion? I haven't used Hancom myself, but have heard good things from people who swear by it ...
Sure, Hancom isn't free, but neither is StarOffice...
If you include Wine in the mix, then the answer is a resounding...sometimes.
True, I was very upset to see that missing. While Microsoft may break most macros between versions of Word, you can be sure that they still serve as trojan horses, viruses and can wipe your hard drive. Without features such as this, how can Sun and KDE ever hope to compete?
The Star Office equation writer is supposed to rock, much as the one Microsoft bought a few years back. I don't know if it can read M$'s continuing change of binary formats, but Star Office's ability to translate WORD.DOC and M$.XLS junk is very impressive.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's my favorite use of Notepad and Wordpad; when viewing text containing just CR's, or just LF's, I forget which, instead of CRLF's, Notepad doesn't automatically convert this for you. Wordpad does. So, Wordpad is useful as a viewer when you'd like to see stuff layed out with nice newlines; just be careful not to Save. Notepad is nice to see text more acurately.
Sure, I know at least one person will reply with "But my Linux/Mac/Commodore editor can do this and more!", but at work, I do have to use MS products, not Linux/Mac/Commodore (though I do have a Slackware machine running right next to my required MS one)....
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
The competition should have scored major bonus points for not using clippy! That annoying little Fscker!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
see ghostscript and ps2pdf source to learn about Post Script and Portable Document Format.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
LaTeX
>OOo does have slightly better MS Office
....
>compatibility,
The article was _specifically_ about this issue
Star and Open Office both write to Word97/Word2000, and they work just fine for people in the M$ world. So, not only can you read crap from sorry neophytes stuck with M$ crap, you can edit their stuff and give it back to them as well. Generally, this kind of echange goes on by email as attatchments. With a little coaxing, you can get such people to see the light and only send text portions of what you are working on. This is harder to do with people working for big dumb companies or who are otherwise insensitive to bandwith and time constraints.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is OOo's killer app - we have switched 40 of our 85 employees worldwide so far and they ALL love the ability to send as PDF and export to PDF - EASILY and FLAWLESSLY!
NOTE - How do I encourage switching? a) I offer new PCs with OOo - keep your old PC or get a new one but that has just OOo on it. And b) That PDF killer app as mentioned. So far everyone but one ueser is extremely happy - and (B) is the reason.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
You are still in school, and you were writing papers back in the C-64 days? Most kids don't start writing papers until last elementary school/junior high... what kind of eternal student plan are you on?
I've heard of Ph.D's taking a while, but wow...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
here and here.
Both from that thread. AFAICT OpenOffice won't be illegal, just have to support the DRM tags of Word format.
Now, regarding the DMCA, I agree that it sucks big time and you (I'm from outside US) people should organize to change/remove this law. I for one will fight to make this law impossible in my country.
Disclaimer: If I disagree with you I'm probably trolling...
I would love to see openoffice take off, but after months of trying it, there are often time when "minor" formatting changes make all the difference. In the minds of most people, having MS word on your computer is an assumption. Along with that assumption is that everything they send in the doc format presents just the way it looks on their screen. As wrong as you may feel that is, its a fact that you have to live with. They can spend enormous amounts of time to get that formatting correct. For example, I write research papers on occation. There are almost always co-authors. Almost all of them have MS Word and assume I do too. Yet when tables format incorrectly and need to be adjusted constantly, when the headers/footers are lost in conversion, when reference links get out of order, etc, etc... -- ITS A PAIN IN THE ... In word processing more than anywhere else, I need it to just work. Asking everyone else to switch to be compatable with me is not an option anymore than asking everyone in France to speak English for me is an option.
I realize that many people don't see this as typical use, but its probably more common than you think. Business documents get mailed back and forth all the time, and formatting is important.
BTW, yes there are forward compatability problems within different versions of Word (also a pain...), but they are no where near the magnitude the article talks about.
I believe the reason business will LIKE having DRM in documents is that it allows them to control the content. Can you say "leak?" This could well do wonders to stop whistleblowers, doo-good'ers, and the like. It'll even help stall government or regulatory investigations. I'll presume that either the DRM keys are subject to subpoena, or that the DMCA has provisions allowing DRM cracking for law enforcement purposes, but that takes more time. If a company doesn't keep multiple DRM keys carefully bound to select data realms, they'd HAVE to fight a key subpoena because it exposes data outside the realm of the data subpoena.
Interoperability may be a minor concern compared with data control.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> I wonder that a study made in January 2003 is > only published in August! Ummm Peer review? Eight months turnaround time is nothing excessive in academia.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
For small and mid-size businesses,the key is the brain-dead quick-learning-curve personal database with good reporting capabilites. Once OOO has an Access killer, it will be unstoppable. People will work around the file format issues.
The OOO data design tools that allow you to work with MySQL and PostgresSQL via unixODBC are a start, but still too difficult for the average Joe.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
.DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
Take off your tinfoil hat. The DRM feature is not a part of the file format itself. It's a feature in Office that you can turn on when you save a document, so that you can secure it for other people in your company only to read it! It's not even on by default.
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
Well, your wild-eyed conspiracy isn't going to happen, so relax.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
Next time, actually RTFA that you're linking to.
"Sufferin' succotash."
A friend of mine's work just bought typewriters (not just one, two in her three-person-department alone), because some of the forms they get are preprinted (yes, they pay extra for the preprinted forms) and they need to type on the correct position on the line.
Yes, you heard me right, 2 typewriters for 3 people. Actually 1 boss, 1 full time and 1 part time.
And yes, it is the government (local).
Grow up, MS Office is the future.
A user here just complained they couldn't open a Excel spreadsheet. I couldn't open it either - no error message - just a new blank workbook. I suspected file corruption, but could see the data with a Hex editor. So I tried to open it with OpenOffice 1.0.1. Voila! Resaved from OO in Excel format and the document is now usable again.
... Mod parent up! (Why don't I ever have mod points when I need them?)
This is the second day in a row in which a Slashdot "editor" chose to willfully misrepresent the formats/compatibility of Office 2003.
This sig intentionally left blank.
It's very simple, really.
He's a moron.
"RTF is the format from hell. All existing readers interpret it differently "
That's the formats fault? Sounds like people aren't coding compatible RTF readers to me. I like RTF except for the ineficient way it handles graphics (some sort of lame, wasteful UUE style encoding).
I'm sure you're a nice guy, but what really pisses me off is this:
You really should care if you can log in via LDAP in a Windows AD; or if you can share a file betweens different OSs, or be able to map a network drive.. but file formats ?
Let me say something, everywhere I've worked I am the biggest free software/Linux/open source dude there. And every time strong arm nerd tactics are used people looked at me like I'm a dick. File formats? Yah, because even though you may change to OO in the office, someone is going to get an email with some other version of M$ Office that's not gonna work right and they're either gonna call the resident geek or the IS person.
Nowadays, the IS people are like "oh, well, why aren't you using M$ Office like everyone else." The days of the *nix IS people are dwindling - unfortunately.
Over the years I've had all kinds of people coming to me - in my various roles - complaining about these mundane issues. And for them, they don't want to 'send it in PDF format' because a lot of the time, they're requesting changes and most people, most people do not have a PDF converter.
And as far as compatibility with Word-type apps, people might but probably won't feel at home in some OO version because it just doesn't look like an M$ app.
As much as I agree that the M$ stuff needs to be over and over now, the geek attitude will not cut it in the end-user world. We need to not just provide leadership (which entails showing how much of a cost savings OO is) but flawless and patient support.
Most if not all non-tech employees jobs are not to screw around with technology. When they need an attachment opened, that's what they need to do. They're not asked to configure MIME types and such and therefore, they shouldn't be asked to figure out why this file is not compatible with that. It's major hand holding. But, it's going to need to be done if we want to break the M$ grip.
Using the usual nerd arguments is not going to change anything and most people do not see these things like we do, they see them merely as tools that do or do not work right.
The article didn't list what version of patch StarOffice was at. The current patch is PP3, but I believe around January PP2 would've been out.
Each patch has significant bug fixes and MS Office compatibility tweaks so it's hard to tell from the article what level they were at.
I can say this with precision: OOo kicks total ass with MS compatibility now. I have yet to see a corrupt table! Check out 1.1 RC3 - or just wait for the final - should be out anytime now.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Inoperability isn't just in your own office - it's with your business partners as well. Between e-mail and file sharing, Word, Excel and Powerpoint have become standard formats for sending information between companies. If you're e-mailing word docs to your ad agency who is a Mac shop or excel spreadsheets to a supplier who hasn't upgraded his systems, you have to work with old format files.
You're going to see a lot of admins defaulting the save command to office 97 format.
They are trying to lock customers in to using their office products. This is in their best interest as a software company.
That is, until the next version of MS Office, which has patented technology in its file formats. Even attempting to read/write that new version will be a patent violation! So much for limitless interoperability...
Guess what? This is a major opportunity for OpenOffice.Org. The reason why Mickeysoft hasn't made major changes to its file formats in SIX YEARS is because of user resistance. Every time a file format change has been suggested, there is a loud chorus of Fortune 1000 companies that scream "No! Don't do it! We don't want to convert all our documents!" And in the past, when the Fortune 1000 corporations scream, MS listens. However, they aren't listening now, perhaps to their peril.
We need to start pushing OpenOffice.Org as a viable alternative to having to change file formats. And what's more...it's FREE! And it runs beautifully on Windows! It even runs usably on a 233MHz G3 PowerBook with only 192MB RAM running Yellow Dog Linux! It might not be able to deal with the fancy stuff, but then again, older versions of MS Office can't either! It IGNORES Word/Excel macro viruses! There is such a compelling business case for a big switch to OO.O it's not even funny.
We might not be able to get the Fortune 1000 to switch to Linux on the desktop. But we certainly can get the Fortune 1000 to switch to OpenOffice.Org on their Windows desktops.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
OpenOffice.org 1.1 has compatibility problems with its own format, too. See Bug 16128
God KOffice had abyssymally low scores! I guess that seals is KDE just plain sucks hairy asshole compared to Gnome. You KDE fucks need to get a life.
According to the OO OSX page, you must install xFREE86 to use the OSX version and they are several releases behind. That is a major barrier for mixed environments.
Yes, it's really fun to bash Microsoft and all but seriously, take off your tinfoil hats. The document encryption feature in Office 2003 is an extra feature, it's not on by default, you have to enable it for each document you make. This is a feature directed at corporate users and boosting Windows 2003 Server sales, it probably does not affect home users or compatibility at all.
Oh, and reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is allowed under the DMCA, I think.
Sigh... did you not read the discussion yesterday?
:-P
DRM is enabled IF you want to protect certain documents. If you don't want that, all is good. But if you DO want DRM on certain documents, that means they must be controlled (and you must WANT that because you selected it!). So the fact that randoms running free office suites can't read the documents is what you actually WANT to have happen.
...for saving in PDF - they'd be doing them a favor. Adobe would most definately sue MS if you were then able to EDIT said PDF after the fact.
Adobe doesn't care if you create the thing - it's the editing part that they expect you to pay for.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Those people were totally screwed in later releases. Not only was it the buggiest of all versions, but the least compatible since Works 2.0.
International support between versions doesn't exist - well supposedly until Office 2003 so if you have something written in Office 97/Korean, don't plan on being able to properly open it here.
XML write support is only supported in the enterprise edition of Office. Secure document initiatives in Office 2004 will insure that portability of documents can and will be restricted. While this could be conceived as a feature, it will also be a pain in the ass - mark my words.
Publisher users know all too well what happens between ANY version revision.
Who knows what other wonderful and mysterious changes will be in store?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Keep up the good work - you've obviously got the knack.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
We all know MS is going to release Yet Another Office Upgrade. And we know it's going to break compatibility with OpenOffice and other alternative suites. And we can probably count on MS using DRM/DCMA to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering the format.
It is important to begin telling everyone you regularly communicate with that you will NOT accept MS Office file formats that are not backwards compatible with Office 97.
Let them know well ahead of time, so that the meme gets well-implanted long before MS starts filling their heads with advertising.
Let your contacts know that it is their responsibility to ensure their documents can be used by others.
In this way, you will help encourage people to look to alternative office suites, think twice about upgrading to MS Office, and will encourage greater use of compatible file formats.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I think that Fortune 1000 companies are far more likely to switch to StarOffice than OpenOffice. That is, after all, the whole business strategy of StarOffice: that companies are a lot happier when they pay someone for their software, because at least there's someone to give tech support and/or blame if it goes wrong.
Hey, it's your money - defend MS and closed source all you want. But just think for a minute and look at the incredible progress OOo/StarOffice has made in the last two years of development since Sun took over the code and released it.
:) But think about the public schools. Think about your tax dollars and how much of that goes back to MS and other closed source vendors. I'm not saying that they shouldn't use it - if they need it. We determined that StarOffice would do everything we needed it to do.
Two years ago - while OOo/StarOffice was still in beta my school was in a quandry. We needed more MS licenses (a lot more), due to our adding teacher and student computers. It chafed me to think that we'd end up getting MS Office again, and then again in 2003, all the while dealing with their 'secure' initiatives like activation and the like.
So we instead to the road less travelled and went with OOo/StarOffice. It was rough because OOo wasn't yet out of beta and StarOffice was still 5.2. But by late October, everything was straightened out and last year went very smoothly.
The advantages for us were overwhelming: free copies of OOo for every student and faculty member, a $79 site license for StarOffice on every on-campus machine, and compatibility with what we already had.
We are a private school here in PA. I took a major risk and it was worth doing (i.e. I got to keep my job after all).
But do you think it even gets a fair hearing? With cities like Philadelphia getting sued by the BSa for copyright violations simply because they wanted to communicate with their home districts, why shouldn't they at least consider an alternative - ANY alternative? Shouldn't these things go out for some sort of bid? I dunno, that's just what I think. I'm frustrated because it all works so well here and I have a hard time understanding why it wouldn't elsewhere (other than your usual naysayer resistance).
People bitch that Open Souce software is disorganized or doesn't ever seem polished. OOo is proof that it can be, with guidance and vision. How would it be if more companies would be willing to sponsor development like this?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I contacted the author as soon as the story appeared here on /. asking for details on where Gnumeric had problems, and asking for him to retest with a more current version (1.2 beta1). He responded with
Hal Varian at 9:31 Wed Sept 3, 2003
{ speaking of that I went back and checked the 9 files that failed. It turns out
{ that in 7 of the cases, gnumeric simply displayed a different part of the file
{ on the opening screen than did excel---scrolling to the left revealed the same
{ document contents.
{ This really shouldn't count as an error. I think that I wil lsend in a
{ correction that Gnumeric actually did much better than it had appeared.
He also confirmed that they were testing appearance, not numberic accuracy or compatibility.
They should have tested OpenOffice 1.1rc3 instead of 1.0.1. There have been massive improvements to the MS import filters since and it probably would have ranked a "99" in all categories, besting whatever StarOffice version it was they tested. It's still not perfect, but plenty good enough for most people. So far I've only run into one Excel spreadsheet that was problematic (it contained a bunch of complicated diagrams and graphics along with some scripting.. kinda an abuse of the whole spreadsheet concept anyhow)
> Sounds like people aren't coding compatible RTF readers to me.
The problem with RTF is that there isn't really a single codified standard for what you should implement. Most people just follow MS Word's implementation, but it has so many quirks (even between versions), that it's hard to do it properly.
From dictionary.com:
lock-in
[standard] When an existing standard becomes almost impossible to supersede because of the cost or logistical difficulties involved in convincing all its users to switch something different and, typically, incompatible.
The common implication is that the existing standard is notably inferior to other comparable standards developed before or since.
Things which have been accused of benefiting from lock-in in the absence of being truly worthwhile include: the QWERTY keyboard; any well-known operating system or programming language you don't like (e.g., see "Unix conspiracy"); every product ever made by Microsoft Corporation; and most currently deployed formats for transmitting or storing data of any kind (especially the Internet Protocol, 7-bit (or even 8-bit) character sets, analog video or audio broadcast formats and nearly any file format).
Because of network effects outside of just computer networks, Real World examples of lock-in include the current spelling conventions for writing English (or French, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.); the design of American money; the imperial (feet, inches, ounces, etc.) system of measurement; and the various and anachronistic aspects of the internal organisation of any government (e.g., the American Electoral College).
Oh fuck off. that bug report is for a BETA version of the software.
What? Me? Worry?
Please rank the following PDF makers in quality and/or features:
Adobe Acrobat
Ghostscript pdfwrite
LaTeX pdflatex
OOo pdf
How often do OSS contributors show real interest in software usability? It seems more like a common disinterest to me. OSS contributors are primarily coders; sometimes this can be a hindrance. Do you choose the user-friendly behavior that's many times harder to code, or do you choose the less-friendly behavior that's easier to code? Everybody hates writing GUI code, so few people are willing to write good GUIs.
Furthermore, many developers don't know how to make good user interfaces in the first place. Do most OSS contributors design software with usability as a focus or as an afterthought? Do they design the code around the interface or the interface around the code? Do they design UI mockups and prototypes? conduct usability tests? get heuristic feedback from usability experts? take feedback well from users?
Much of the attitude I've seen is user-neglect. If a user doesn't like the way something behaves, the response is an elitist "use the source, Luke." If you don't like it, change it yourself; if you can't change it yourself, too bad, because no one's interested in improving usability. It's a lot of work with little instant gratification, even though it pays off in the long run.
Or maybe they throw in skinnability--a poor substitute for a proper UI design--and say, "Hey, it's skinnable. If you don't like the interface, you can change it." (... often ignoring that interface usability involves much more than aesthetics.) Or maybe they're just ignored completely.
What about OpenOffice viruses?
This isn't a troll--I was just wondering. Would OpenOffice's macro language be useful to a virus writer? Are macros embedded in documents or are they seperate files that have to be run explicitly by the user?
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
The same bug will be present in 1.1 final. It will not be fixed until 2.0 (hopefully) and I'm sure it's present in 1.0.3.1 which is not beta.
So don't tell me to fuck off.
from what i understand the way MS built the new DRM technologies into Office is to have it go to the server (which needs to be running Sever 2003) and ask it permission.
... im thinking they chose to do it this way so they could sucker people into buying BOTH products instead of just upgrading one. why not build it such that it uses public key cryptography and all the informaion of who can access what is SELF CONTAINED ... all the person will need is a personal certificate ... and there will be no need to access the server ... and they can still access the document when the server is down ... course we all know Windows Servers NEVER go down for anything :) hehehehe.
this seems to be a little over kill
OpenOffice and StarOffice have similar user interfaces and features, but they are not the same. The difference is roughly comparable to Netscape and Mozilla.
You might try downloading the Office 2003 content developers kit. There you'll find the WordML Schema...
Also - how can MS provide XSLT for arbitarary conversions? You don't really seem to understand how XML transforms actually work. You'll always need to design your own transforms...
I used to do timesheets with Excel as I work remotely and have to bill my time to various jobs. I had some formulas that would scan the spreadsheet and calculate day totals and so on.
Recently I took the Excel sheet and started doing the timesheets with OO. I then save-as Excel and email it to the office for processing. I noticed a couple of problems in the process:
Where do you want to go today?
How do I look at my old data?
Old data must be maintained, just like the rest. You must keep copying your old data to new formats, all the time, as soon as the new standard format becomes available, and certainly before the reader for the old format dies. You must also use non-proprietary ways of storing your data. Plain old text is always best if it works for you.
The good news is that because of the exponential growth in storage the old data is only piddling amount compared to the new data you are piling on now.
All the data I used to do my thesis and that I brought to my new place of work 10 years ago fits on one half CD. I brought it on a SCSI 512MB hard disk, which I'd bought for the purposed and failed years ago.
Before that all the code I'd written for my previous company fitted on a few floppies. Before that my important Unix (SunOS 2.x) home directory files all fitted on a single tape.
I used to think that my whole home directory would fit on a single CD, then on a single DVD, and now I'm kind of stuck, I need several hundreds of GB or masses of CDs. But in 10 years time it will be nothing.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
In MS-Word??
You CAN do pivot tables. They just aren't called "pivot tables". They are called "Data Pilots" and you can start the wizard by Tools -> Data Pilot.
Amazing, eh?
The paradox is this: MS has to justify the cost of the new Office suite by leveraging it's stregths against the weaknesses of it's older versions. Regardless of OpenOffice or AbiWord, to run as a self-sufficient commercial unit MS *has* to do this. So, inherently, by building-in incompatibilities with older versions of Word (intentionally or not), MS has created The Difference, whether it be selling-point or simply aesthetics.
By creating a schism within their own product line, they automatically divide their client base: launching the new yet nurturing, to some degree, the children of old who still solemnly swear by Word97.
I would hate to see the current OpenOffice publicised prematurely of being anything but a possible alternative to Word. It is not a replacement for many lines of work that rely on Word's functionality, evilly-executed or not.
My two cents...
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I ran into a similar incident with a powerpoint document.
A user came in with a floppy with his power point document which he was editing from the floppy and ran out of space when adding a new slide.. He had been working on it all afternoon and Office could not open it at all.
I loaded it in openoffice and tada 14 out of 15 slides recovered.
It's amazing that openoffice is more compatible with office documents than office is.
- really aren't designed to be editable (though some newer versions give you some limited capability)
- Are very often formatted to look like an A-size or A4-size portrait-mode piece of paper (which isn't the shape of my computer screen
- Are very often formatted in multiple columns, which fails *really badly* for reading on a screen that isn't portrait-mode-shaped and doesn't have enough pixels or height to view a full paper page at once
- Often have fonts that work really well as black marks on dead trees but don't work well at 72-100dpi screen resolutions (though that's a much more common problem with academix LaTeX -> dvips formats) and especially don't work well at non-integral magnifications like 158% or 122%.
But it's the read-only part that's really the worst of it, unless you're doing something sufficiently specialized that it's actually important to have that.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Old versions of bloatware often work really fast when you're running on new hardware, as long as they don't have operating system dependencies or other problems that kill them. Sure, they wanted 64MB of RAM and 100 MIPS to get decent performance, which was pushing the limits of your Pentium-133 machine, but on your current PC with 512MB-1GB of RAM and 2000 MIPS of CPU horsepower, things like that seem a lot faster.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But if you're trying to read it on a computer screen, it's BAD BAD BAD!! Two-column is basically only readable on portrait-mode displays that are large enough to show the whole page at 100%, which few desktop computers and almost no laptops have, and otherwise you've got to keep scrolling the thing up and down. The typical Knuthish fonts are very pretty at 300dpi or more and quite ugly at 72-100dpi, and it's worse when you've got to run the thing at weird magnifications that maximize the amount of black space on your screen (since those pretty formats have margins.)
I do find MS Word frustrating as well, and if I were starting over today I'd use LaTex instead of troff, but for most things I find that dumb ASCII or at most HTML is a better choice - describe the relationships of the objects in the document, and let the reader display it with the reader's visual preferences (which are typically tuned for the reader's display hardware and vision.) To some extent this is because I haven't written any real mathematics papers in years - F0RTRAN-style X**Y[I]/Z equation rendering works ok for 99% of the equations I write, in spite of the obvious aesthetic deficiencies, but there are a variety of ways to get better looking equations.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is profound.
I had not thought of it in those terms.
Quick. No-body tell SCO a dictionary publisher or anyone else who may try to claim ownership, get a legal hold over English, and extract a price for its use or abuse.
And, what use is 'prior art' when no-one can spell?
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
I also use crossover office (wine) with ms office 2k, and it works well for me. I have also used openoffice.org, and I actually like it quite well, but it doesn't work compatibly enough on documents with lots of templating, header/footers, graphics, etc. I need to exchange such docs with clients. It isn't an option to tell my clients to use a different office suite.
In OpenOffice, under Tools->Options in the Text Document/ General/ Compatibility section, you can de-select "Use printer metrics for document formatting".
In Word2000, under Tools->Options in the Compatibility section, you can de-select "Use printer metrics for document formatting".
In fact in Word2000, it's deselected by default.
Well, there's this:
r l= /library/en-us/dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?u
That's great, no need save OO writer documents as MSOffice2000/97 files, I can send the documents in native format if both OO and MSO2003 support xml. no? yes?
I bought a new PC a few weeks ago. The OS was Windows XP Home but that was the only Microsoft product on it. For an office suite it had Star Office 5.2. I would have prefered 6 or even OpenOffice.Org but it was better than paying Microsoft Tax.
Of course as soon as I got it home and set up I put OpenOffice.Org on it, but the fact it came with significantly less M$ than most new machines was cool. I now use OpenOffice.Org as my principle WordProcessor/SpeadSheet/Presentation package. I only use M$-Office for Access and if I have to use a template that has VBA macros in it for work.
I've now converted a number of my friends and collegues to OpenOffice.Org and many have reported that after about half an hour of playing they were just as good with it as they had been with M$ Office (they were all quite experienced users of M$ Office) and after a few days they've noticed that their productivity has improved and it's a lot easier to use.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
I think what is almost as interesting is that one of the authors - Christopher M. Varian - is only 16 years old.
I loved computers when I was 16 also, but I think I had a few other compatibility reserach projects I was more interested in at that age.
Darin
www.deru.net
If they send you something in Word, you use Word because that is what the customer wants
But can we bill the customer for a Windows license and a Word license? Not always.
Will I retire or break 10K?
And Julius Caesar likely pronounced his "KYE-sar". Language evolves.