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!"

Comments

important to note

[maharg]

It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs

Sad but true ;o)

Re:important to note

[IM6100]

Believe it or not, and it is unbelieveable in this day of networked computers with many printing and output resources available to them, Microsoft Word's formatting functionality is in part, and it's a significant part, dependent on what default printer you have it set up to use.

It's an unbelievable anachronism, but it's the truth.

Corresponds with my findings

[tcdk]

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).

Office 98 only exists for MacOS

[Jjaks]

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).

Re:Anti-trust ruling

[carrier lost]

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.

That's true, in spirit. In actuality, if I remember correctly, the conditions under which MS is required to open the protocols for the office products contain at least two rather difficult obstacles:

1 - Licensing fees
2 - J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:

1. 1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties:

2. 1. (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of a particular installation or group of installations of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria; or

MjM

Oops, they did it again...

No, not licensing - more like this:

[mijok]

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.

Office 2003 fully supports xml documents

[*weasel]

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.

Screaming at the top of my lungs

[EmagGeek]

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...