Slashdot Mirror
Star/OpenOffice XML Format To Become ISO Standard?
Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "
Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it. They use it because the alternatives suck. Yeah, Abiword is smaller and faster and takes up a little bit less RAM but it doesn't work as well as Word. Yeah, StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don't have the features that Word does.
People use MSFT because they are already locked in. Word does what they want it to do (and sometimes a lot more than they want it to). Just because Sun gets to set the standard in XML doesn't mean that Office users are going to give two shits... As long as their Word documents continue to open and they can continue to email DOC attachments to their email instead of just typing in the body of the email they are happy.
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office. It will be free, it will be marketed, and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality. Honestly, as great as the OSS alternatives seem they just aren't Office/Word. You have to create a superior product and then market it. That's where OSS falls behind.
Everyone thinks that Firefox is so great. People weren't switching because they didn't know about it. Once IE vulnerabilities started showing up left and right they were alerted to the fact by mass media marketing. Sure, some people saw it and moved and even more didn't because they don't get their news from anything but the scrolling ticker below Survivor and The Apprentice...
The read-more link isn't working...
The best thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from!
Can the ISO standardize an MS-Patented way of saving documents??!!
I wonder if microsoft will support that format too. It would be childish not to, but I wouldn't be suprised if they would totally ignore it and continue using there own format in M$ Word
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see this become a standard, but we still have a long road until we can get rid of 'de facto standards' (read: MS Office). I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends. Anybody care to comment on what can be done to 'sell' OO.org to these people?
Turbo Smorgreff
To really lure people away from office Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support. I have been having issues with trying to open excell spreadsheets that are password protected. I then have to ask the person to mail me them with the password removed. Thats the penalty for using FreeBSD/Linux and OpenSource office packages. However Im in love with them after using it and cant go back to windows and office.
Its the small bugs that make a big difference to the end user. Especially when opposite products own such a large market share.
...won't M$ will have grounds to complain that a backdoor way of making their proprietary [Word, Exel...] stuff into open source stuff has been created?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I doubt that a lot of people will abandon what has been hammered into them for years in favor of an open standard. There's not a lot of perceived value in switching.... yet!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This kind of move cuts down on vendor lock-in if and only if the dominant vendor (in this case m$) chooses to conform to the standard rather than do their own thing. So don't hold your breath.
I am officially gone from
Why? Businesses don't care about interoperability. They care about integration around business practices, workflow, rights management and collaboration.
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need, not mom-n-pop or real small businesses that don't actually manage their best practices.
I know I'm going to get modded into the toilet for saying it, but this is from years of experience in enterprise applications. OpenOffice might get there some day, but not until the people working on it and with applications around it are people who actually have made a living building advanced Fortune-50 caliber integrated information systems.
One of the problems open/star office has is that it takes forever to save or open a document due to its gzipped xml format. I know people here are willing to embrace anything that is an alternative to a microsoft product, but i really think that we could come up with something much better than this. Lets not lock ourselves into a stupid format.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Then what will I do to get my morning Clippy Fix.
Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office.
Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"
Call me a pessimist, but having a non Microsoft standard isn't going to matter much, what with Microsoft being able to make its own standard.
Besides, how many times have you heard office workers say "Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly or render transparent PNGs?!"
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office.
Or better yet, maybe it will encourage Microsoft to make these document formats available for use in Microsoft Office!
Ha, I crack myself up sometimes.
I doubt they'd even consider an import-only option in MS Office. Their general policy with such things these days (i.e. with a monopoly) seems to be "pretend it doesn't exist".
It doesn't have to "lure people away from Microsoft Office". All we need to break the Office monopoly is a setting in Office to change the default save-as file type. Ever wonder why there isn't one?
Sure you can save as RTF, but only if you change the file type every time. That makes a corporate policy of portable file types impossible to enforce. MSFT can say they support X number of formats but until you can specify a non-MS default format you will never get the majority of users to save in cross-platform files. The network effect makes sure that once a mojority of users are using office, then everyone needs to use office (and the latest version of office at that). You can make a suite that's MS compatible, but it will always be at best 99% compatible and likely a version behind.
If you could specify a portable format as the default corporate wide you'd be in a position, after the new format had some time to soak in, to begin looking at alternatives.
You know what would lure people away from Microsoft Office? Forget Clippy, get some nice ani Gif's of a bikini-clad Carmen Electra showing you how to properly format an interdepartment memo. Maybe an oiled up Brad Pitt for the ladies.
I don't see standardization as a method to draw end users to a new technology. Sometimes it will draw developers, but I'd be surprised if anything as minor as getting a new ISO standard would hurt the MS Office market.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
Standard /. conspiracy theory follows : It's all a plot by Microsoft.
ISO can tie a standard down in a tangled mess of beaurocracy ; while this might bring credibility it also runs the risk of preventing OOo evolving its formats as fast as it would like to.
Which is something that M$ sure would like, as OOo is now getting to the point where it can start to compete with MS Office.
Admission first: I know pretty little about OO and its document model, but I know enough I guess about that other office suit to say - the main problem w/ MSWord format is not the format per se but that the app itself is crappy. I mean - you don't even put a line of text an 45deg slant w/o 3rd party objects embedding. More importantly - the frames are embryonic to say the least.
So, question now - would the format in subject be suitable to export, say, FrameMaker document to it and not loose anything important?
There exists a technical committee at OASIS to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice). How does this differ if it's a ISO standard as well?
I wonder if this will actually change anything, because Microsoft still dominates the market. I bet i'm still going to end up having to go file->save as. and then convert it to .doc all the time i want to share anything with anyone else. Sure they can make it a standard, Microsoft won't care, as witnessed by their screw-ups with DHTML and CSS. and i heard about them messing with standards in C# or something too.
"Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office."
uhm - what planet have you been living on for the last decade? It's very simple. People use MS Office because people use MS Office. Not because of the file format. I'm forced to use MS Office at $DAYJOB because my customers use it. They don't know the first thing about what file format they save their drivel in. They just hit "send as email" and forget about it.
I dislike MS Office as much as the next guy. If I had my way, LaTeX would be the standard. But if anyone thinks that an ISO label on a file format will lure anyone away from MS Office they're plain wrong. Period.
Underholdning.info
MS pantented the way of saving documents with all pictures etc in *one* XML file. In fact, OOo documents are ZIP files, containing different XML files and the pictures in for example PNG format.
Furthermore, the patent would not remain valid in court as at least AbiWord has prior art.
This would be great! the EU *SHOULD* back this move by mandating that any Office Suite that is to be sold in the EU or used by any government within the EU MUST conform to that ISO specification.
That would EXCLUDE extensions, meaning, the format, if embrassed by Microsoft would have to be 100% ISO XML compliant - No embrace and extend for you! (Microsoft)
XML may be an aproved standard and so on, but having support for true xml in any open source software won't lure users from MS Word, no matter how standard XML is. As far as most businesses are concerned, .doc files ARE STANDARD, and the emails very often have .doc attachements. Heck, they could mail PDF, but they don't. They keep using Word. Talk about the power of the habit.
This point can't be under-emphasised.
Fat lot of good an open format is if users start embedding freaky OLE objects in, like "windows bitmap" as OLE instead of as bitmap, or windows metafile, or word art, or various other formats that only have windows servers for them.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
This is a good first step.
The next step will be for some radical organisations, ie Munich City Council, to require that all their organisations files be stored in non-patent-encumbered standards.
I think this is great, and I am very pleased that the European Commission seems to be headed in the right direction for once.
However, following the publicity of the MS-SUN agreement I do not expect that Sun will actually do this.
First of all an extended version of the format is bound to become a defacto standard in non Microsoft offices anyway. IBM, Corel and others already have formed a group. The open source offices are moving towards it already. And last but not least at least it used to be, that many governments if they have public business deals, often have, if there is an iso implementation of something we are going that way clause in their contracts.
Is Word a true replacement for a CMS ? Shouldn't 'real businesses' be buying a CMS solution which will keep their information in a format that is easy to access, easy to search, and easy to move between different processes - ie presentation/email/database/html? One that includes true version control, rights management, and open storage.
Word binary files are most definitely not a part of an 'integrated' solution - you can't even read the documents with any other tool but Word!
Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "
Maybe for businesses, but not for the home users. The vast majority of them could care less about what file format things save in, assuming they even understand the concept of a file format in the first place - and really, why should they care about it?
The way things stand right now, 99% of the people common user's going to send files to is going to have Office available.
...which are you able to integrate better, a standard well-documented XML format, or an undocumented, proprietary DOC format? I'm not saying that it is there yet, but I don't the potential is any less, quite the opposite. I see so many possibilities with generating OO compatible documents on-the-fly. Imagine using databases, spreadsheet data and whatnot to create reports, offers, contracts, pie charts and whatnot. It has the potential to surpass anything I've seen.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Lots of companies are already compelled to conform to other ISO standards, such as ISO-9660, in order to get contracts etc. If this becomes an additional requirement for those organisations, it would have huge implications.
If it's an ISO standard it won't do a damn bit of good until the Microsoft OS's and Microsoft mail system and Microsoft Applications all know to do the right thing. Whad'ya think the chances of Microsoft cooperating are?
Slightly OT, but hey, here goes:
What's the number one reason people under 21 use Word?
To write reports.
So, you'd think it would be good at it, right?
Nope. Word sucks for reports. Writing even one, there are a couple really obvious things. First, there should be an EASY way to text as no-spell/grammar check. Every good report has a bibliography. But bibliographies are always covered in wavy red & green underlines. Why? (Yes, I've seen allusions to there being someway to do this with the Find/Replace dialogue in the Help files, but yeah, that's idiot. What does marking text as no-check have to do with Find-Replace? Anyhow, I could never get it to work reliably...) Meanwhile, if Word is really a tool for writing reports, shouldn't there be a wizard for constructing simple bibliographies in say MLA and Chicago style. There should be no reason to go to a website like noodlebib for such things, as my school encouraged me to do.
Next, adding auto-captions to documents is worthless in the current implementation of Word, since there's no obvious way to put a reference to that auto-caption in the text and have it auto-updated too. (Again, there maybe some way to do it, but I struggled through the help files, to no effect.)
Other issue:
Title pages -- I shouldn't have to press enter a bunch to put my name in the approximate middle of the page. There should be a wizard of some sort that lets you choose between different layouts for title pages.
Bullets & numbering-- the auto functioning on this is a nightmare. If you could give lists names, then it would be much easier to say this bullet is part of list A, have it continue the numbering of list A not list B, which it is also adjacent to.
Blockquotes-- HTML has a tag for blockquotes. Why not Word? Blockquotes are a pretty standard feature in reports, but Word doesn't have a built-in style for that.
Meanwhile, I have constant struggles with fonts reverting to the default paragraph style at near random. (It seems to crop up when backspacing one paragraph into another?...)
I'm sure there's a lot more, these are just some issues off the top of my head. Star/OOo.org should tackle them if it really wants to make headway as an INNOVATOR instead of just an MS wannabe.
This may have been funny about 5 years ago. Come on, why must we see this comment on any Slashdot article with the word 'standard' appearing in the text. Perhaps I should write a Slashbot to automates the process.
Think global, act loco
I dislike MS Office as much as the next guy. If I had my way, LaTeX would be the standard.
And you wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take you seriously. Who among you REALLY believes that the sea of secretaties and accountants and lawyers and paralegals who actually use a word processor every day would prefer to use LaTex over Word? That's not even laughable -- it's pathetic, and it's proof why the open source ghetto will never rise when it comes to user applications as opposed to server applications.
Contrast this issue with that of the adoptation of IPV6. The ONLY way we will ever see IPV6 adoption is through a government mandate. IPV4 has way too much "inertia" for anything to supplant it. The same can be said of office applications. Try submitting your resume in anything but .txt or .doc (MS Word) format. NOBODY will be able to read it, believe me I tried sending mine in .pdf format and was told to "please send it in word". Once companies wishing to sell software to government are forced to support a common (and open) format then perhaps people will actually be able to choose the word processor they will use, otherwise they are locked in to what ever the dominate product (and it's proprietary format) are at the time.
Cheers,
_GP_
Someone has to cajole them into support. (We have a chicken-n-egg here, no doubt).
Without support for things like Bloomberg's Excel add-in, OpenOffice is MUCH less attractive than Excel, for example.
Word sucks. I can't count the number of times I've had minor (styles all messed up) or major (loss of major portions of document or even entire document) corruption of Word files.
I do not use Word at home and I avoid as much as possible at work. There are lots of alternative word processors or text editors.
On the other hand, what alternatives are there for spreadsheets? I'm looking for a spreadsheet that is:
There are lots of alternatives to Word. I haven't found any alternatives to Excel that satisfy the criteria above. I'd love to remove all Micro$oft software from my machine, but until someone comes up with a good alternative to Excel, I'm stuck.
When the OpenOffice file format becomes an ISO standard, Microsoft may be forced to support it, since organizations will likely put "ISO office document standard compliance" into their requirements.
Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.
The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.
That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.
For the people that want their documents to look good, latex is a very nice alternative to Word / OO.
There is a real chance that, if the OOo format becomes an ISO standard, organizations will put it onto their requirements checklist. In that case, Microsoft may not have much of a choice but to implement it.
we dont need standards, we want choice people should be able to use and configure any format they want. The besting thing about open source is choice, we should not have standards. You dont want people to dictate what format you want to use do you? if we have it like that, it makes open source no better than windows. If there is to be satandard, one format will emerge. Hmm, i think i have heard that argument somewhere...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
1) Tell them that pirated software is theft - oops flame bait - didn't mean to stir the hornet's nest but it is theft.
2) Show them that there's a free alternative. They can clear their conscience without losing anything. Yes I know that OO hasn't got all the features but we're talking normal users here.
3) Show them how beautiful OO is. Maybe I'm biased but to me the interface is simply nicer to look at.
4) Tell them that they'll be the first on their block. We all like to be 'ahead of the game'
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.
If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.
If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile
Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?
The main bastion of Microsoft is the Office & Exchange combination. The file formats are important, but not that important.
As long as there is no true Outlook/Exchange killer out there Microsoft will rule the office domain.
Most office slaves have their business life (and often word and excel documents) stored in Outlook - and old PST files. Plus companies need centralised mail, calendar and adress books - as well as public folders.
So far I haven't seen any commerical combination off an Office product and Exchange substitute that works as well (or bad) as the Microsoft 'standard'.
It's not all pointy haired bosses out there. In the pharma industry, you see software standards like CFR PART 11 being inforced top down. There are rules about documentation retention. All you need is a rule describing in which format they have to be retained... and if there is an ISO format available, then regulation-heavy industries like pharma, nuclear, etc. might jump on board faster then you think. Off course if MS makes a nice export filter....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I've said it once and I'll say it again... what OpenOffice.org needs is a lean-mean OOo Reader Application! By that, I mean not having to download an 80mb installer with everything but the kitchen sink, but maybe a small 2mb or less reader that uses standard widgets (MFC, GTK, etc.) to make the app smaller and faster. I've gotten a friend interested in actually looking at OOo code to make a no-nonsense reader, but due to lack of time, he can't start any open source projects.
.sxw as an attachment to a friend. If he/she has broadband, point them to where to download the app. If not, maybe go over to their place and install it for them. If in another country, get them to download from someone who has broadband, snail mail them an installer CD with the reader and the full OOo app, or pester someone like IBM to include the said reader application with their desktops and laptops. See! I can already imagine the possibilities. If only I can program... I would be willing to test and help promote this stuff (preinstall on all PCs we sell).
A reader app is all we need! Email a
"Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office."
*steals rose-tinted spectacles* Yoink!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Yes, but as XML is only a standard for building file formats, not a file format itself, this doesn't mean an awful lot.
Also, the U.S. is not where open source in general is going to be embrased on the *desktop*. Foreign countries worried about embedded NSA/CIA back doors are the ones that will swarm to the viable alternative.
I read this and the only thing that went through my mind is that people really don't understand why people use Microsoft products. People don't use Microsoft products because they have an ISO standard, they don't use them because they are not-Microsoft (obviously), and they don't really care they just want something that works. I personally use Office, because it is hands down the best office suite out there, and I use it because I can share my documents with other MS Office users. Personally ISO standards are great but Defacto-Standards are better, that is something that the Linux people just haven't grasped yet.
Making the OASIS Open Office XML format also an ISO standard would surely be nice and make it look better on paper to corporate and institutional IT managers. But for the EU, the current standardization process through OASIS should be good enough, since the question is whether controlling the format by two standards bodies at the same time will be technically feasible at all.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Isn't that a liability waiting to happen? With Sun's agreement with Microsoft paving the way for litigation?
I've tried to get peole to realize that in a few years, you won't be able to read many of the documents we are currently archiving because the office formats will have changed or the app that was used to create it might not be available to open it. I've tried to get people to save their read-only documents as PDFs and their "collaberative editing" documents as RTF, but this has proven to be difficult.
If I could go to my supervisors and point to an ISO standard format, I could more strongly argue for any "archivable" documents to be required to be stored in that format. From there it would me much easier to get people to save ALL their document that way.
I use OOo exclusively at work and love it. I am trying to get it installed as the default office suite on ALL new installations, with MS Office only installed on the desktops of those who can demonstrate a need (show me a document that won't work that you can't live without.) Right now OOo's documnet format is "just another word processing format". If it was an ISO standard, it'd have something strong to stand on for the "buzzword-only", tech-impaired descision-makers at work.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
When someone sends a M$ word document to someone who does __NOT__ have M$ word, can they read it?
NO THEY CAN'T, unless they have M$ software of course.
Now there is software that does read M$ formats but it's because the formats were reverse engineered not because M$ said, "Oh, I am sorry here's the official M$ format".
File formats are by definition a particular way to encode data for storage or transfer.
Every single file that resides on your hard disk is encoded so that some application can use it.
When a files encoding is not made public only software allowed by the author may __properly__ access the file.
And Microsoft has not made those file formats public, why? M$ intentions are purely commercial. Because to access or create __proper__ M$ documents you must have M$ software.
This is called software lock in.
Now the least you can do to thank those people who have strived to make M$ formats readable by other software is to __use__ their software (download OpenOffice), otherwise just keeping paying M$ every year.
Here's one that isn't in OpenOffice, and probably won't ever be.
It would enormously help my development process to be able to create a document whose tables are dynamically linked from a spreadsheet.
In my case, the spreadsheet is a four column list of requirements (#, name, description, criteria to test). I'd like this to be the origin of all requirements, from which the SRS pulls line items and the build process checks source to confirm that every Req is represented in the object model, and no unaccounted for methods exist.
I can't do it in OpenOffice. I can open the spreadsheet file and pull requirements in the build, but I can't keep the SRS in sync with the requirements spreadsheet automatically to avoid document cruft.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I've done some hacking with OpenOffice XML files and I have to say, they're nothing if not logical ..... Verbose, naturally, but that's offset by the ZIP compression, and anyway storage is cheap nowadays. What's impressive is the way you can break everything down into separate files {for a neater format} or not {easier to create}, as you think fit, and it all still makes sense. Beautiful.
..... but not necessarily!
Migration of existing files from MS Office is still the big stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption, and one that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that MS Office can't read or write OpenOffice.org files -- well, it wouldn't, would it? Putting in OpenOffice read-only compatibility would mean legitimising OpenOffice. Putting in read-write compatibility would mean suicide. So it seems as though OpenOffice will always be stuck playing catch-up over file formats
It's my understanding that the MS Office macro language can access and modify every feature of a document, and can also read and write text files. Surely, then, it should be possible to write a suite of macros that would allow you, using just a single licenced copy of MS Office, to read any Office document and re-export it in OpenOffice.org XML format?
Of course, in an ideal world, it would be illegal to lock up file specifications. Till then, we just have to run with the idea that if anything at all can read it, something else must be able to read it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I have never seen a company wanting to invest in OpenOffice because they just weren't approached by any sales guy. Managers who make purchasing decisions where they have to buy 20,000 licences have to think in terms of support. M$ office has support and sales guys, that's for sure. Whether it's a better product? It's questionable.
Earlier this year, I built a system that used the Lucene open source search engine and had to process most types of documents - just getting the text, no formatting information.
It was so easy to handle OOo documents! Open a gzip input stream, pass it through a SAX XML parser, and grab the text as it flies by.
Easy! Now, don't even ask about getting text from Microsoft Office documents (did it, more or less, but that was a hassle).
Meters, Litres, Centigrade etc. Enough said
Well, this is interesting but I'm not convinced about how much ISO standardization will have an impact. ISO's OSI networking protocol lost a standards battle to tcp/ip in spite of the ISO certification playing well with governments. SGML has been an ISO standard for a while with dialects only recently trickling into common use via XML.
Of course there is the political sniping between many European governments and Microsoft which is a factor.
But it should be noted that just because something is a standard does not mean that everyone will play nice with it. Anybody can subvert the standard through "embrace and extend." Netscape did it with HTML, Microsoft did it with Kerberos, gnu did it with most of the POSIX utilities.
Linear regression in excel:
LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)
Linear regression in open office:
LINEST(y's range,x's range,1,1)
Most people dont purchase softare relative to its native fileformat, they purchase due to its features.. ( or because they dont know they have a choice.. )
No one is going to care its n 'iso standard' ( most users wouldnt know what you were talking about.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't understand - with all these talented hackers, why doesn't someone write a plugin that allows MS Office to "Export to" or "Save as..." .sxw?
Wouldn't that be a BIG step towards accomplishing this? After all, it's the FORMAT that's a big deal, not the app.
Right click on toolbars, customize, select extended formatting, click close. Then click on the 2x space (or 1.5x space) button. This works on Word 2000, probably very similar on any other version of Office.
So it's 5 clicks only the first time you use it, and from then on, it's 1 click. I've never used it before, and it took me approximately 45 seconds to figure it out. I still, however, cannot figure out how to insert images into OO docs without leaving them default size or distorting them all to hell. OO is just too frustrating and clunky for me, and I don't do much beyond text and images - sometimes a little line drawing.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Seriously, can you - or anyone else - name one major incompatiblity between MSVC's implementation of C or C++ and the most commonly used ANSI standard?
I haven't used VC in a while, so I can't swear to the latest version, but last time I used in (VC6, I bevieve), the following would refuse to compile:
But this would compile with no problems:
Having completely wrong scoping means headaches when trying to move any code to/from VC++, which I would call a major incompatibility.
CVS and the like are as important to revisions of documents as to software.
In this light, the one thing that troubles me about OOo's XML format is that there still appears to be no option for writing an uncompressed XML file.
Doing this would fix one of the worst things about putting documents into CVS (with, say, MS Word docs), that they are usually binary and not diffable.
The FAQ for OOo mentions some sort of "history" behind the decision not to do this. Whatever the arguments are against it, they can't be as important as the need to use proper revision control with documents.
I would further recommend a no-leading-whitespace formatting of said XML so that changing only the embedding of a document piece doesn't generate a diff jackpot.
...how else could you explain the following statement?
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office. It will be free, it will be marketed, and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.
WHAT THE HELL? I don't even use HALF the levels of functionality already in Office XP...and half the functionality in Office is exteremely annoying! I don't even care about a lot of what OO.o has to offer. When I work in Linux I use GNOME office products myself--Abiword and Gnumeric ALREADY work better than MSWord and Excel for what I do--and they start and run just as well as MS Office on a machine with half the memory and clock speed (my Celeron 750 notebook PC with 128MB RAM is dual boot and demonstrates this performance difference quite effectively).
Just because there are less features doesn't mean they "don't work as well"--what's there works very well thank you very much. I am not as familiare with the KOffice counterparts however I know a lot of those users would say the same thing about their favourite product.
Your example of Firefox illustrates this perfectly. Firefox is smaller, better engineered, less clogged with "features" and as a consequence more secure and faster. If size and features were of paramount importance it wouldn't stand a chance against IE. Same goes for maturity--Firefox is only a preview release and it is still catching on rapidly. I'm sure there are enough people who think like me--who just want a spreadsheet to manage my stock portfolio or do statistical calulations in the lab. I don't need a spreadsheet that can play old arcade games and can be made to take total command of my PC!
I want to waste my time reading Slashdot, not making sure my macro and bazillion other security settings are properly configured. This could be the year that brings the straw that breaks the camel's back...I'm fed up and although the situation at work is out of my control, I'm ready to eliminate all Microsoft products from my home entirely. I don't even play Windows games anymore--I find I really have to think hard why I even bother with Windows anymore.
The solution is effective marketing. People need to no the truth--MS OFFICE IS A BIG PILE OF CRAP. Outlook is every bit as bad as (or even more than) IE in regards to security. Word and Excel macros still exist and can still be destructive. MS Access is a frighteningly unreliable database that shouldn't be trusted for much more than Grandma's recipes. The fundamentally flawed security architecture of Office products in general is enough for me to operate under a state of mild paranoia when using them. If more people were aware of these shortcomings, I'm convinced quite a few would switch to something else and wouldn't even miss the bulk of the features missing in the alternative.
I'm getting sick of /. comments that are just whiny nerds bitchin' about their sorry lives b/c of idiot end users and "M$".
/. know all about Microsofts trangressions.
Without customers to buy computer products the tech. industry would be shit. That "drivel" they save their files in may actually be drivel but you can't tell me with all the people out there that use Word there aren't some documents in that format that probably make the world go round. Perhaps it isn't the best but bitchin' about it to those that are just as in the know as you is counter-productive.
And while I will be marked as flamebait, I continue.
This "M$" thing is just showing how childish you can be when talkin' about a company you think acts like a spoiled brat. If you hate Microsoft fine, but for the sake of the still sane stop whining. Again the majority on
If you're sick of it then put your money where your mouth is, round up all the other like minded geeks here and code the second coming of desktop operating systems, office suites and whatever else you feel you are missing in ur tech. obssessed lives. And no, GNU/Linux running Gnome/KDE won't cut it.
No sig for you!!
Not only that, but both Word and Excel mess up their own files and refuse to open them, but OOo often still can, as has been said by me and confirmed by others, or vice versa, here and elsewhere. And with OOo you get a fairly decent drawing program, which behaves itself better than Visio. The spreadsheet is better too, especially if you really need user-defined functions.
As it happens, a colleague has just bought a new PC, tomorrow I am bringing him a CD with OOo and Mozilla. One more! In particular, Inept Exploder and Lookout will be replaced by something more secure, and I think that OOo will be at least as useful as his copy of Office 97. Now if he tells his friends.......
The alarm bells should be ringing in Redmond, but they may be drowned out by the sound of Sir Bill's tantrum.
What about something like planmaker, which is designed to be as Excel-compatible as possible? It's only $50, too. Excel et al are hideously expensive. Even the STUDENT copy of Office 2003 standard is $130 and a full (non-student) standard version is $300! I don't have that kind of money to spend, especially when OO is free. And nobody say to pirate it, because I hate that. You're just helping MS more.
...not because of what you think business want:
They care about integration around business practices, workflow, rights management and collaboration.
Becasue I agree with you. It IS odd that you believe MS Office is part of the solution for a "real" business. Can you give me a concrete example of how MS Office (and MS Office alone--not the "Office System Solution" that costs five figures for software licenses alone) helps a business "manage theie best practices"?
My extensive personal experience in this area is that MS Office is usually part of the PROBLEM, not the solution. Generally, Office2K and earlier are not NEARLY scalable enough to address these needs beyond a small workgroup level, and with later versions (and MAYBE the 2K version) in order to take any useful advantage of its power you need to buy into MS from top to bottom and run a very tight IT ship. In my experience only very large, multinational corporations do this right (I work for one and they do it mostly right--and even we struggle at times).
Existing standards, let alone Document interop:
PNG - broken
SVG - Use Microsoft VML instead
CSS - whoops
XHTML - "no soup for you!"
Hell, even the latest VS.NET doesn't do XHTML properly - and from what I've heard, neither do the betas of 2005...
Copyright Infringement.
Theft would be if they actually stole the source code from the vault.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Right now it's the very large offices of big businesses and governments which are actively reaping the most benefit from open source software. An ISO standard document format will only spur this trend forward. Bear in mind these are offices with sizeable I.T. departments.
Adoption of open source in small to medium sized businesses is a slower process and we can't expect many of them to lead the way on this one either. This is a direct result of MicroSoft's intelligent saturation of local college certification programs. If quality open source training programs can advance in the college market, so will open source adoption.
More to the point, an ISO standard ensures that anyone who feels they can build a product with a more compelling feature set than Microsoft or Sun is free to do so.
As far as I know, you should have either written "metres" and "litres" or "meters" and "liters". Mixing British and American spellings mid-sentence is a bit odd.
Also, Centigrade was renamed to Celsius back in 1948.
Finally, the US government has never really tried to legislate the use of SI the way most others have. You do not have a legal requirement to list kilograms anywhere pounds are used, or to post speed limit signs in kilometres, or anything of that sort.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I happen to think that it is one of a number of acceptable alternative ways of doing it, there are other valid ways, or there is the total mess of M$ Office files....
And nobody say to pirate it, because I hate that. You're just helping MS more.
Well, if you want to be realistic about your argument (that MS Office is just too expensive) then you have to include this in the discussion. At the university I attend, I know of *no one* that bought a stand alone copy of Office. I probably know of 5 people that said "it came with my computer." The rest have a pirated copy and always have. Hell, most everyone I know has a pirated copy of windows itself.
It just isn't a viable argument to say that it's too expensive. It can easily be obtained for free.
You've never had to explain to a clueless user the difference between a monitor and a computer have you?
Tell you what, sit those same folk down and now re-train them on how to do mail merges. Heck, try explaining why they're being retrained even!
Actually, it's a bad idea to depend on ANY single vendor for the format of important records that have to be held long-term. We can still read the Magna Carta, no problem. Anyone tried to read Microsoft PowerPoint version 2 files? Or WordStar files? Even Word Perfect is increasingly complicated for many people.
For long-term records, I can easily imagine a requirement to store them in an ISO-standard format. OO.o's format is actually especially nice: it's compressed (.zip) and XML-based, so it takes very little space.. perfect for long-term storage. Even if all the programs stopped working, as long as you knew how to unzip the files, you could view them in XML.
For public information, you need a format that any user could read, no matter what their operating system or office programs are. Again, a standard format works nicely. And the fact that OO.o files are compressed is helpful for low-bandwidth users (esp. the poor and those in eastern Europe).
Microsoft's ".doc" format has been used for these purposes, but it's not really good at it. It's really only designed for a single word processor, it's not really documented, it doesn't support standards like XML, etc. And I believe Microsoft's new XML format doesn't even capture all the information from Word (while OO.O's clearly does). The ".rtf" format isn't really that much better. And although they're talking about developing better conversion software, the OO.o software already includes .doc conversion software, which could already be used to support an upgrade.
There's already work to create a standard for PDF to support very long-lived documents that must be available "forever" to arbitrary platforms. It's called PDF-Archive PDF-Archive looks very useful for its purposes, but it won't support exchange of editable documents; its purpose is to fix everything (such as page breaks and so on).
The world's needed a standardized editable office document format for a long time, where the standard is a real standard that is publicly documented, can be implemented by multiple vendors (without patent royalties/limitations), and isn't controlled by any one company. Maybe the world will finally get such a standard.
Frankly, if there's a standard and the EU pulls off such legislation, that's a big coup. If many governments start releasing files in such formats, then others will want to make sure they can read/write those formats. And if it's a standard, it's much more likely that competitors (like OpenOffice.org itself) will have a chance.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
It just isn't a viable argument to say that it's too expensive. It can easily be obtained for free.
Yes, but a majority of us have morals.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Well I don't know about everyone here, but I was suprised last night when I right clicked under windows on a sxw file in xp (with adobe acrobat 6.0 pro) installed and got a "convert to pdf" thing. And it worked perfectly. I would assume this didn't happen without some effort by someone at adobe...
Yea we all pirated everything in school. Mostly justified it by saying we couldn't afford it so wouldn't buy it anyway. That's what I did...
Of course, after graduating and getting a job that line of reasoning didn't really work anymore. Found myself going legit just because I couldn't think of a good excuse anymore. $90 for an OEM Windows install isn't all that unreasonable.
Of course I haven't touched a word processor at home in well over a year (since I finished school), so I've got no need to buy *or* pirate Office...
My request to any Star & OpenOffice users out there is: could you please provide some scenarios where going with StarOffice has been beneficial to you as opposed to OpenOffice? I know the link I provided mentions features like a database component in StarOffice but I'm more concerned with real life examples. It would be interesting to see how both suites practically stack up to each other.
Consumers won't neccesarily be affected by this. What do they care about file formats and future compatability? However, governments and other entities that care about reading their data archives in 50 years will most certainly be interested.
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
I do it with no clicks -- Ctrl-2 for double-spaced, Ctrl-5 for 1.5 spaced, Ctrl-1 to go back to single spaced. This keyboard shortcut works in both MS Office and OpenOffice.org. Another option, as others have pointed out, is to customize your toolbars -- again, a solution that works for both products.
Def #6: Moral adj. Based on strong likelihood or firm conviction, rather than on the actual evidence: a moral certainty.
Well, I don't know about you, but I get that warm fuzzy feeling inside when I pir8 a MSFT product.
The real path to male liberation
Until OO can compete with the power of M$ Excel, I won't be able to switch over. But that one thing is all it would take.
I am a huge fan of XL, but the rest, I can live without.
So, if anyone knows of any good [free/cheap] compettitors... please reply.
I hate my sig.
...it's mainly the americans and british who insist on using an antiquated and overly complex system of measurment.
I am NaN
ISO's OSI stack was standardized before it was really implemented, with the result that the implementations were large, clumsy, and clunky, if you could get them at all. This is a big risk of standardizing something before you implement it. SGML at least had some implementations, but the implementations were hairy (to get all the details right), so the resulting libraries were expensive.
In contrast, OpenOffice.org presumably already implements this specification (or something very similar to it), and is available for free. So the major reasons that OSI lost are gone. Note that XML has done well in the marketplace - they took SGML, simplified it, and implemented things before they declared version 1.0. And TCP/IP is the prime example of trying things out before you declare them as officially a standard.
Sure, there's a battle here, but it's possible.
Certainly, there is a risk of "embrace and extend" becoming an interoperability problem. In the end, consumers need to be the ones guarding against that.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
It allows organisations to easily draw up contracts that ensure that the programs they are purchasing/licensing conform to a known standard.
At the moment it's quite hard for organisations to specify how 'open' they'd like their office tools to be.
If they can just write into the contract that the programs must be able to save and load files in ISO standard 12345 then it becomes a lot easier to understand and enforce the contract, which lowers the cost and the risk of that contract.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Sun's file format complies with the published XML standard.
When Microsoft changes to XML, then their files will also be standardized.
Does this ISO group want to make sure that Sun's file format will never change? Because it might, but it will still be XML, which would make backward compatibility much easier.
At my university, XP, VS .NET, and Office are distributed free and legal by MS.
I'm a database guy - and I've wrought near-miracles in extracting critical records from the clutches of any number of short-lived, bug-ridden, poorly conceived proprietary storage schemes, some of which go to great lengths to make the native data unreadable to anything but the parent application. When the parent goes bust, succumbs to obsolesence, or just fades away, businesses are left holding the bag -- and if I, or people like me, can recover the data, we darn sure don't do it cheap!
Office Suite Features:
Most of us don't need all the features built into even the simple office suites today. My wife is an author, and I've talked about her quest for the perfect word processor. She wanted something simple, like AbiWord, which stored documents in an open format (she got to retype an entire novel once!), with very basic tools.
Word is a behemoth, and on long ( Open Office has all the power most users will ever need -- and it's Macro support makes it pretty easy to add any special functions that may be needed. I'd like to see a few sets of customized menus built (I know, I know, what's stopping me!). One could easily build a menu for professional authors that hid most of the complexity while clearly showing the features they need, rather than burying them under five layers of sub-menues. I'm sure other professions could be similarly served.
In short, the problem is seldom that a critical feature is not found in Oo, but that the feature or the syntax may not be immediately apparent to the user. Complexity is a two-edged sword, which we cut ourselves upon too often.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/27/1 111202
Having the OpenOffice XML file become a standard would be bad because it then prevents you from improving the product.
This is the same problem that Microsoft is facing with MS-Office -- they can't make any changes that would break the file format (since customers bitched about the file format changing all the time), thus, you aren't seeing any super-duper new features come out.
Source: Joel Spolsky's interview with ITConversations.com
Chip H.
This is hardly surprising development; OOo file format has already been adopted by OASIS as its recommendation; most Open Source word processors have either adopted, or have plans to adopt, OOo in some form (AbiWord at least)... it's just a logical continuation. And finally Sun has major stake here; it's selling JDS, and one of selling points is full StarOffice suite. But it could certainly use the boost of being "ISO standard", especially for governments it'd be a BIG thing, b elieve it or not.
I would love to switch. I run Linux at home exclusively. I use OpenOffice.org whenever I possibly can. Unfortunately I cannot switch entirely.
I'll switch entirely when I can feel confident that when I email my resume, it can be opened by the recipient properly. PDF, though much more secure, standard and easier to manage, just is not accepted as much. 100% of the employers will accept Microsoft Word documents (up to version 97) but none state PDF or OpenOffice.org files.
I want a new job. Taking a risk because I am using OpenOffice.org and saving my resume as a Microsoft Word 97 document is too much of a risk. Sometimes the formatting is not exactly as I intended it. One time of having a paragraph blow past the right margin and print oddly could mean the difference of getting an interview or not.
For now, I have to stick with Crossover Office and Microsoft Word. Sometimes, I even have to fire up VMWare and run Office in true Windows. sigh.
Simply stating [Citation Needed] does not automatically make you insightful or brilliant.
I think you're looking at the wrong thing: the program. I don't want to care about the program. What's important to me is the data. If you create a word processor document, do you have all the details of its data format so that you could extract the data later if you needed to? Or must you depend on a particular version of a product? Already Microsoft Office cannot correctly read many files that previous versions of their product created only 10 or 15 years ago. But government records may have to be kept viewable for centuries or millenia.
And don't say, "It's popular, so it'll always be readable." WordStar was at one time the dominant word processor. Nowadays few programs can really read its format (which is luckily close enough to ASCII that the critical stuff is extractable). Apple ][ disks were once common; think you can easily read them now? How about in 500 years?
Users own their data, not vendors. And thus users need to know exactly what the data format is, so that they can have access to their own data. And in commonly-used formats (like office documents), these need to be standardized, so that vendors can compete on an equal footing with products that manipuate those formats.
The World Wide Web was so successful in part because the normal data format (HTML) was publicly specified -- anyone could write a program to acquire and process the data. That's a key advantage of standards -- once the data format is standard, people can write programs to process the data in new and useful ways.
TCP/IP is a standard, but nobody complains that there "shouldn't be a standard." Why? Because we NEED standards to exchange data. Office data format standards are needed for exactly the same reasons: to let people exchange data.
Now it's true that there's always a risk that standards are created "too soon" before their functionality needs are identified. That's not an issue with office suites; their basic functionality hasn't changed in a long, long time. Another common risk is trying to invent a standard from whole cloth, without implementation first. Again, not a problem; OpenOffice.org implements this, and I believe both KOffice and AbiWord implement parts of it, so it has some real experience.
And the OASIS folks are doing a real review of the format so it can handle things in the long haul. Already they've made minor changes, since the format is now undergoing real scrutiny, and the minor changes are getting reflected in OpenOffice.org to ensure that the changes are helping instead of hurting. In the end, they'll have a specification that has at least one full implementation directly (OpenOffice.org), plus filters to and from Microsofto Office and several other office suites. That sounds like pretty good vetting, actually. And if it'll be implemented in StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, people will be able to use it immediately, and without fee (if they wish), so that eliminates many barriers.
I actually think this is fairly common in standards-land. Various vendors develop formats. One is developed with liberal/no licensing requirements, so that it can be implemented by multiple vendors. That format, because it's supported by multiple vendors, is picked by major customers, becomes a standard, and then dominates the rest. In videotapes eventually VHS dominated over Betamax, in part because Sony wanted to "own everything" and the smaller vendors who were willing to go a less proprietary route ended up taking them to the cleaners (though I grant that other Betamax issues like 1 hour lengths were issues as well). That doesn't mean that Microsoft's formats will be el
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
But this OOo format does include a way to store metadata, in office:document-meta. See section 2.2 (and section 2.1) of the OOo 1.0 committee draft specification. You can even include arbitrary metadata (say from another metadata format specification, like the W3C's RDF). There's some info in there about storing author names; nothing built-in for abstracts.
If you think they should predefine something, or recommend something as a starting point, please research what you think they should do, and then submit your recommendation and rationale to the OASIS office group. A well-reasoned proposal is going to get a serious look by this group, and if there's no serious challenge (or the challenges are well-rebuffed), you're likely to get it in.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
But on past performance from the Illegal Monopoly, this is about what can be expected, their own developers of course would know about it, and would therefore be at a very unfair advantage over everyone else. IIRC they had their knuckles rapped severely in several court cases, not just the monopoly trial, over that very thing. In fact I think the first time was the DR-DOS case, and that is a long time ago. Says it all really.
Seeing as it provides for only the first solution in any given problem.
It seems to be unable to present a range in its possible solutions.
rgds
This ["$"] works the same in OO.org and Excel, and is a VERY useful if underdocumented trick that I have discovered.
Underdocumented? Excel 97 explains it pretty clearly in Help -> Topics -> Formulas -> References -> Relative and Absolute References [or whatever they're called in English, I have the Japanese version].
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office. It will be free, it will be marketed, and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality. Honestly, as great as the OSS alternatives seem they just aren't Office/Word. You have to create a superior product and then market it. That's where OSS falls behind.
.DOC at least nearly perfectly. It's not parsing .DOC that's so important, it's being able to richly interoperate with Word users.
.DOC.
.DOC?" - this is a significant advantage to Microsoft, often referred to as a "barrier to entry" in regards to the competition.
One of the things in OSS that works well is competition. Somebody implements X in Y and it's really keen so everybody adopts X. When OSS isn't mimicing others this is how it improves.
There aren't many good word processors in the OSS arena. The Word File Format is at least part of the reason - no word processor can thrive if it doesn't read and write
If ISO/Sun/EU spec/require a standard format, Word will probably get an exporter by customer demand. Suddenly it becomes much easier to interoperate with Word users because you don't have to spend the effort to read/write
The litmus test for a Word Processor today is "can it read/write
When that barrier to entry doesn't exist Word will have more competition. That's just the nature of a competitive environment.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For IE, it's in the hands of the web developers. For office stuff, I think it will give companies an "excuse" to adopt OpenOffice on a wider scale and allow them to formally use OpenOffice.
Since it will become a standard, that also means that while MSOffice might not use that format, they will have to offer import/export support for that standard, which they don't currently do.
I think this is just what's needed. Given the increased use of Linux as a development platform, a lot of documentation will need to be written about many Open Source APIs et al and an Office suite that can work cross platform is what many companies will be forced to look at in the near future.
What I'd really like to see though, is the various Linux Office suites adopt this as the default standard. This would give users a LOT of choice without sacrificing on portability. Ofcourse, this would be like the holy grail - very very hard to achieve.
Also, what I'm most bothered about now is that the best thing MSOffice can do is to develop a Linux version. This will be the worst thing from an OSS standpoint and will effectively nullify the standard - ask yourself this - if you have a document to deliver in a few days to some customers who use Windows, and a Linux version of MSOffice is available, would you even CONSIDER using any other office suite?
The good thing from all this though, is that no matter what, this WILL result in a large increase of exposure to Linux.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I am not sure if many of you have used oo in Linux. I run kde3.3 suse 9.0 and I find fonts and gui to be terrible. I am not sure if this is a problem with kde guys or oo guys. Sure I use gnumeric and avoid M$ as much as possible. Any responses of people using oo in Linux?
doesn't openoffice use semicolons?
I now h0w OS arch1TectutureZres worKK, so if teh windoze Doesntt habe teh FORK(); is TEH SUXXORZ!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!
Amusing, as always. Indicative of serious frontal lobe degeneration, but amusing nonetheless.
...running on Linux, which if you download a community distro is not only free-as-in-beer but also as-in-speech.
I am NaN
FU!