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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!"
Whatever they do, someone will always find a way round it, it may take time, but it will happen.
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.
"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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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 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.
New version of what? The Microsoft or the OpenOffice?
New version of Microsoft Office. They're coming up with new incompatible file formats. Real bad for interoperability everywhere.
If OpenOffice, is there something wrong with it? Please, tell me, why shouldn't I upgrade?!
OpenOffice is just fine, and each new revision brings better MS Office compatibility.
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...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
For microsoft any product other than the latest version is a competetor , whether its from other verndors or their own old version doesnt matter
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
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"
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.
I did a major project for a company in VB macros under Word. Sadly, the next upgrade of Office blew them all away. The estimate I gave them to fix all the macros approached the cost of the original project. They asked for some kind of assurance that the next upgrade wouldn't do the same thing. I couldn't give it to them. Rather than invest in fixes, they returned to doing it by hand. This was long before any Macro viruses.
Microsoft is their own worst enemy!
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.
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.
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.
But back in 1985, computer users spent a good deal of money to get a printer that would closely emulate what a typewritten page looked like, i.e. expensive daisywheel printers.
These days people have the arrogant notion that their written text should look like it was typeset in a proprotional font, without having crossed the desk of a good editor and being published first.
And that's not really a good thing.
A Good Intro to NetBS
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. ;)
"Standardized consistent spellings coincided with the rise of dictionaries"
Correct.
"which are the authority on spelling and usage of words."
Incorrect. So incorrect, in fact, that it betokens a complete lack of understanding of the English language and how she is spoke; and spelled.
C has an authority. Java has an authority. French and Icelandic have authorities.
English does not. Nobody died and made Noah Webster king. Dictionaries are snapshots of the language as it exists in the majority opinion of a panel of experts ( who often disagree) and many ( if not most) dictionaries disagree with each other on certain particulars.
English is open source and we make it up as we go along.
KFG
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."
Amen, brother. My senior year in college I converted from Mac to Linux & from WYSIWYG to LaTeX, and I never looked back. Absolutely beautiful output with hardly any effort at all. I got all As that year, and while part was due to improved study habits (to write a paper, check every possible book out of the library, head to the local pub and don't leave until it's written), I credit most of it to the fact that the standard LaTeX article template is so pleasant to read.
WYSIWYG was really a step backward, unfortunately. Text should be written as content, then rendered into a visually appealing form automatically.
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.
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.
It's not supposed to be a freaking troll. Why does the truth always get downplayed as a troll on SlashDot?
.DOC compatibility in their programs). If you disagree with my interpretation, so be it... but my track record is quite good. When Bush was elected and everyone downplayed the dangers, I said "A, we're going to get into a war. Or more thant one. And B, Microsoft is going to get let off the hook." And lo and behold, I was right on both counts.
I simply provided a link to a previous SlashDot story, along with the message that I took away from it (i.e. that it may soon be illegal for any non-MS entity to offer
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It's to be expected.
Microsoft software is designed so that someone with no idea what they are doing can throw something at the computer and have it come out looking pretty decent. In this context, even repeatability is not necessarily an asset let alone a requirement. It's useful, very useful, provided you don't really care what it looks like.
If you care what it looks like, or if you need it to be readable 5, 10, 20 years from now you need something else. PDFs will still be readable, with or without Adobe. With no idea what I'm talking about, TeX and friends will still be readable. (Totally unfamiliar territory, but whatever it is they do and however they do it, they will still be around for a long, long time.)
Where do you want to go today?
How do I look at my old data?