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Fulfilling the Promise of XML-based Office Suites?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-golden-opportunity-for-innovation dept.

brentlaminack asks: "Almost a year ago Tim Bray of XML fame said 'when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented that you and I can't imagine.' Now that MS has dropped the ball on the XML Office front, and StarOffice has fulfilled its XML promise, where are all those 'wonderful new things?' Is anybody out there writing Perl/Java/whatever programs to take advantage of StarOffice XML? Could this be an opportunity for Free/Open/Libre software to leapfrog MS Office in real productivity as XML proponents have promised all along?" What kinds of new and wonderful things can you come up with?

4 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by Otter · · Score: 4, Informative
    ...when the huge universe of MS Office documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented that you and I can't imagine.

    Well, I'm taking a break right now from generating new Excel graphs by copying old ones and changing the source data, which isn't so bad, and those fucking error bars, which is. Oh, and the scatter plot points are superimposed so you can't click on the back ones.

    So if I could do a find&replace on a flat file, I'd have been done an hour ago.

    Other than that, no, I can't imagine either. VBA exists now and it's not like we're all flying around with wings and harps.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Re:standardization by chill · · Score: 5, Informative

    The next major release of KOffice is supposed to adobt the OO file formats as their own standard.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  3. Yup, peeople are by amblin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Take a look at Axkit's, OpenOffice filter.

  4. Re:Microsoft Dropped the Ball? by YouAreATool · · Score: 4, Informative

    At this point, people should realize /. articles are mostly fretards talking out their ass. I too read this article, thinking: wft? As I am writing this comment, I'm looking at my (beta) Word 2003 file save dialog and an example XML doc I just made. It round-trips all formatting and junk in the XML format. It has a "save data only" checkbox in the saveas dialog, and can support xsl transforms (you supply the xsl) on export. If I cared, I think I could make it export OpenOffice format pretty easily. The high-fidelity XML file has a lot of junk, but it's all XML.