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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. "
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?
It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better. OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found. The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format) Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I spend the majority of my "working time" on the computer word processing, and I actually prefer OO.o. Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six). And I can create my own outline, thank you very much. Better that way, too, since it gets you to think about what you've written rather than just pressing a button.
How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.
What are you talking about?!! I have office 2003 on this machine i'm working/typing on but what do I use as my office application? Opeonoffice/Staroffice. Why? because it's already BETTER!
It will always be available to me, it uses smaller yet more reliable and open file format, it works faster than MS word and can even open word files that word itself chokes on, its autosave function is FAR more reliable than word's autorecovery, it never messes up formatting and especially outlines and bulleted lists the way word habitually does, i love the autocomplete feature, stylist and navigator are GREAT for accessibilty and ease of use, I like its templates/autotext/macros and the way they're implemented, I like the way its toolbars and keyboard shortcuts are customizable more than i like the way word does them.
The navigator is fantastic, I love it. (And it is only floating by default, it docks quite happily).
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?
Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six).
Do you mean five in Word or were you talking about another word processor? Word: Format -> Paragraph -> Line Spacing -> Double (this is a stretch as it's really only a single click but I am giving you the benefit of the doubt) -> OK
Although I have the Formatting toolbar enabled and it's only two clicks for me.
The main problem with Microsoft's formats is that they are basicly memory dumps of the actual data heap. To have a program read those memory dumps it has to follow the memory structure of Microsoft Office, which is not easy even for Microsoft, because they change their binaries from time to time, thus making their own product slightly incompatible to their format.
In the most cases it's very odd combinations of different features used in a document that causes the incompatibilities, often they aren't that easy to reproduce. I had MS Office dying in serveral versions due to Word-Documents, which where written in one version of Word, later converted to a newer version and converted back to the old one (this happens quite easily if you are working on the same document at different workplaces with different versions of MS Office installed.)
Programs that are just trying to make sense from the dumps without trying to mimick the memory structure of MS Office have on the one side an easier task because they can't run into memory leaks, dangling pointers or otherwise corrupt data in memory. They interprete the data as an odd structure on file, not in memory. So often those corrupt Word documents could be saved by reading them into Open Office and saving them again in Word format. On the other hand they are often at loss with structures that in some magic way work with MS Office because of some not-quite-bug-not-quite-feature program part. With those situations at hand you may loose some formatting or some contents of your Word files. So it's always recommended to proofread your document after opening it in something else than Word.
But you should also proofread them when you are opening them with just another version of Word, even with a different Service Pack level of the same major release. You never know which bug was fixed where and which odd behaviour which accidentically made your document format right doesn't work no longer.
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
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)
Not true ... for you. For me, it is quite different. I see MS Word .DOC files constantly...even for trivial memos that would be better done as normal text.
PDFs mainly appear for external documents. Even policy manuals tend to be both created in MS Word and passed around as MS Word .DOC files.
I've gotten no complaints from using OOo to create and save documents in MS Word .DOC format, though changing existing .DOC files in OOo has caused problems in the past -- usually with indented bullets. MS Word is supposedly to blaim for mangling bullets, though I don't have evidence either way.
I typically get "Can you give me that as a .DOC. I need to edit it." Editing usually consists of a logo change and having the person change or modify the attribution.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
About the time this decision was made, most formats were in large part tag-based formats (in concept very much like OO.o's, BTW). The problem is that parsing that data stream, building a document structure in memory, presenting that to the user, etc. takes time. Microsoft figured that by skipping the transformation to and from an arbitrary file format would speed things up.
And it does. Pretty dramatically, in fact. That was a *big* deal a decade ago. Even today, that is a problem for OO.o: document save and load times lag behind Word by a *large* margin. It took me 5 seconds to save an *empty* OO.o document. The same thing in word took Of course, the Word file is like 24k big, and the OO.o document is only 4... ;)
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
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.
LaTeX really isn't all that hard to learn, but it is very powerful. Want to know why I use LaTeX? I wrote a couple of document classes for LaTeX - now that took a little work but its done, and never has to be revisited - so that when I write a report I can simply putat the top of every paragraph as I write my report. What's the advantage of that? Well, as long as I do that, as well as LaTeX producing a beautifully formatted report, I can just change the documentclass from report to presentation and produce a beautifully formatted powerpoint style presentation from the summaries I gave.
I even have some finer points that let me share content (figures and graphs for instance, or perhaps a set of equations) across the report and presentation so they appear in both.
The power of simply writing a report with quick summaries every now and then, and at the end of it automatically having a slideshow presentation is stunning. Having both items, report and presentation, shared in one document so changes automatically propagate to both is amazing.
Show me how to do that in Word or Powerpoint in anything approaching the simplicity and ease of use that LaTeX provides and I'll consider switching. I don't think I'll be switching.
Jedidiah.
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