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. "

Comments

Why would this lure them away?

[garcia]

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...

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Alranor]

Yeah, StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don't have the features that Word does.

Which features?

And how many people actually use those features?

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Paulrothrock]

I know it's early monday morning but...

People don't just use Office because they are forced into it.

And then...

People use MSFT because they are already locked in.

Preview button, people!

As a web developer, I would prefer the XML document format to Word's format particularly because I can use different XSLT to display the data, meaning our clients would have greater control over their web sites without having to contact us for a lot of the changes. Just FTP the document to a specific directory and PHP can parse it out into a live page in a few minutes.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[mks113]

I don't believe in your arguement. If there is an alternative standard, people could switch to say, abiword, knowing that they can easily move their documents to OpenOffice.org if it doesn't do all they want. It is also an iterative process. The software will become better developed once it is picks up a larger user base.

An established standard will force microsoft to at least read it, though perhaps not write to it. I think that it would open a world of choice.

It would be more like Linux distros. You can have a bunch of them, all competing, but they are standard enough to be interchangeable without a complete change in business practice.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[gihan_ripper]

The main thing that stops me using OpenOffice is its poor interoperability with MS Office. Perhaps the European Union can twist Microsoft's arm to release details of MS Office file formats? This, above all else, would help to boost the number of OpenOffice users.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[hwestiii]

Agreed. Anyone who thinks standards compliance is going materially affect anyone's market share should share what they're smoking.

I would go your analysis one step further and say that people use Word, not because it does what people want it to do, but because so many other people use it. It is living proof of MSFT's continued reliance on being the "de facto standard" as opposed to an actual established standard.

Market share is its own reward and its own enforcer. Any competitor to any of MSFT's established application doesn't only need to be better, it needs to be LOTS and LOTS better because any incremental improvement can always be justified away by the difficulties introduced by lower interoperability.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[nhnfreespirit]

I use OpenOffice on a daily basis. In short, it does all the things I need it to. If there are features in Microsoft Office that OpenOffice Does not support, I obviously don't need them. But maybe thats just me... I dont agree that shiny new features are whats needed to make people switch to another office suite. I would guess that most people use less than 20% of the features already available in Word (Or OO.o or whatever). Its really a hen and egg situation, people will use what everybody else is using, so while most people are still using Microsoft Office, people have no real reason to use anything else. I guess it still boils down to marketing money, there are simply not enough fancy commercials for OpenOffice, hence very few people other than the /. crowd and other techies know about it. Just my .02 kr. (Local currency in Denmark)

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Xoro]

Which features?

And how many people actually use those features?

Outline mode! That floating navigator is lame.

And the problem with the "how many people use those features" argument is that while almost nobody uses all of them, many people use one or two of them. I make do with OOo, but if I did a lot more word processing, I'd probably spring for word and that crossover thing to run it.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[archeopterix]

Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it.

This, of course isn't true in case of people who must use Office because it's a part of their corporate desktop standard.

People who actually create the standards like having buzzwords like "ISO standard" and "XML" somehow connected to what they pick - it looks good in reports.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Anonymous Coward]

But if the EU Commission decided that it will require all its office documents from 2007 onwards to be in the ISO standard format, then you can bet that Microsoft would come up with good support for the standard format, and that would be a real step towards levelling the playing field in office software.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Anonymous Coward]

yuo teh win!!!

He was pretty obviously referring to the time the entire process takes - which includes the transfer. So your attempt to return his burn on the original post fails, as there is no language problem or conceptual problem that would confound even a moderately bright 5 year old.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[jeif1k]

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.

There are many different kinds of people. I'm sure there are a few MS Office users that, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have come to the conclusion that MS Office is the best office suite for them, but I suspect that group is pretty small. There is also a group of people who, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have concluded that MS Office sucks; when those people use MS Office, they do so because Microsoft controls the standard.

And then there is the last, and probably by far largest, group of users: people who use MS Office not because they prefer it but because it is the only office suite they know and because switching to something else would be a big hassle. Part of that hassle is having to learn a new UI, and another part of that hassle is to try to convert documents in Microsoft's proprietary format.

and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.

The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office. Offering more features is not going to make an open source office suite win against Microsoft Office.

Quite to the contrary: an open source office suite probably can win away users by being more usable and offering fewer features than Microsoft Office.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[smootc-m]

OO does not have to be better than MS Word. It has to be good enough at the right price to erode Word's installed base. Read Clay Christansen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" to understand this phenomena.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[rseuhs]

Creating an ISO-Standard helps a lot:

• First it offers a safe investment. If it's a good standard that is supported by several programs, even if your preferred program might not work or not be available or is discontinued, you can just use another.
• One of the biggest problems with MS Office is the changing of formats. People are sick of it. When it's a standard, it will stay the same, maybe not forever, but a lot longer than if it were no standard
• If for some reason or the other your favorite office program can't open a file, you can try another one.
• And of course ISO-stuff is PHB-compatible

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[bushidocoder]

A couple of features at least my company loves...

a) I know its a heavily debated topic, but my company LOVES the embedded DRM protections in documents - and all the federal customers we work with are also paying very close attention to it. Given the frequency with which you see a word doc accidentally posted online or forwarded to a non-company resource by accident... our management digs the ability to limit viewers of a file to our local network, and deny printing, editting, etc, to certain departments. Future versions of the technology promise to allow Active Directory audit access to document resources, so the company can quickly pull up a list and see who read what, when they read it, etc. That has value to us.

b) Integration with Sharepoint products. Again, another MS product, but it has a great deal of value to some businesses, especially businesses that had a large amount of growth in the past 4-5 years and didn't have their own document repository solutions in place. The integration into word, and the versioning support built right into Outlook 2003 attachments has meant that people actually use it around here.

Does OpenOffice support the same level of editting markup and internal versioning? I'll be honest, its nothing I use so I've never looked, but I know alot of people around here who live by it.

-Steve

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[ari_j]

Which features?

OpenOffice.org actually gets in your way more than Word by default, which is truly amazing. The main feature I wish it had is better Word compatibility. When I open a Word document, it should not:

1. Dump core immediately
2. Dump core later
3. Get confused about where the cursor is and show it 3 words off from where my typing shows up
4. Look different from the Word document
5. Save in Word format in a way that will make Word show it differently than OpenOffice.org did

I've had virtually all of these problems with every Word document I've tried to open with OpenOffice.org on Linux. That's really annoying when you need to work with others. Even the Mac Word users weren't left out in the cold on this, but I was unless I rebooted to Windows. I shouldn't have to do that.

The parent is right - the alternatives all suck, and they do it hardcore.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[flacco]

--quote

OpenOffice.org actually gets in your way more than Word by default, which is truly amazing. The main feature I wish it had is better Word compatibility. When I open a Word document, it should not:

1. Dump core immediately
2. Dump core later
3. Get confused about where the cursor is and show it 3 words off from where my typing shows up
4. Look different from the Word document
5. Save in Word format in a way that will make Word show it differently than OpenOffice.org did

--/quote

how ironic that most of these problems probably are due to the proprietary microsoft file format, and the subject of this article is standardization of office file formats...

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Bertie]

1 It's a bad habit to get into, depending on a spell checker. You're much better off learning to spell and proofread things properly. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm trying to belittle your intelligence - I don't know whether you're any good at spelling or not. I'm just saying that spellcheckers are bad. I never, ever use them, mostly because I can spell, but partly because I don't trust them, since they can't spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context.

2 MS Word's grammar checker is useless. It's just plain wrong most of the time. I accept that a spellchecker can perform a useful function, namely making a first pass over a document to pick out obvious bloopers for those too lazy to take the time to type and read it properly. But if you follow your grammar checker's instructions to the letter, you'll end up producing stilted, formulaic prose, devoid of any kind of individual flair. There's absolutely no substitute for learning how to do it yourself, by simply reading a lot.

If they didn't include spelling and grammar checkers, I wouldn't miss them a bit. And personally I think the grammar checker's a false friend which we'd all be better off without.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[The Spoonman]

And how many people actually use those features?

Everyone uses all of them. You have to look at "everyone" as a group, and not as individuals. Not every individual is going to use every feature, but when you lump every individual into everyone, you'll see that every feature gets used by someone, somewhere at some times.

MS does a lot of research into what people want in their word processors and spreadsheets. If the OO team did the same, OO would have at least as many as the Office suite. It doesn't matter if you don't use all the features, or if your neighbor doesn't, or even if your entire company doesn't. Someone, somewhere does and that's the big difference. MS targets everyone with their products, OO targets everyone as well, but with an "eh, noone uses this feature, so we won't put it in" attitude and then wonders why everyone says their products don't have the same features.

I've known managers who asked me to setup Word for them to always open with the "Memo" template because that's all they every use it for (waste of a manager more than a software package if you ask me..). But, conversely, my ex is a tech writer who has tried OO on many an occasion when asked by management and has returned it to them with a "switch to this, and I'm getting a new job" note attached.

I'll never forget the time rolling out new PCs for a company and the company was switching from WordPerfect to Word. I had one woman complain that it was useless because it didn't have one feature that WP did...in WP, she was able to have a column on every page that was the same. She could do headers and footers, but couldn't do this repeating column. To her, Word was as useless and feature-deficient as OO is to other people. Go figure.

As can be seen in the comments, there are 3-4 different ways listed to set a document to double-space in Word. Why is that? Because everyone does things differently. In order for OO to succeed, it needs to have EVERY feature Word does, and then some. Otherwise, everyone's going to say it doesn't have some feature they want, and not use it.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[schvenk]

It's a bad habit to get into, depending on a spell checker.

First of all, I disagree. My spelling is good but I rely heavily on spelling checkers to catch typos. They won't catch a typo that resulted in a valid word, but they sure help.

Second of all, even if I agreed it wouldn't be relevant. You're not likely to convince people to switch applications by telling them they shouldn't rely on a feature they've come to expect.

MS Word's grammar checker is useless. It's just plain wrong most of the time.

I use the grammar checker much as I use the spelling checker: To catch typing mistakes. Sure, most of its suggestions aren't great, but it will catch sentences where, in the course of rewording something, I ended up with two "the"s in a row or something.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Spoing]

1. There's absolutely no substitute for learning how to do it yourself, by simply reading a lot.

The best 'trick' I can pass along:

1. If you write something that is important,
2. read it aloud. Correct anything that sounds wrong.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[FlutterVertigo(gmail]

Look at the theme of this site: "News for Nerds". So most of or nearly all of the reading audience [here] really can't cast a vote. Those walking into the voting booths are those users, first time - fumbling about, and power users.

Office help are always forced into using unwieldy software in one place or another. Sometimes it's heard & corrected, other times it falls into the category of, "Everyone bitches about something." and ignores it.

Reading Micro$oft's XML file structure won't be the tough part. This means a migration from M$ Office is feasible. Going back to M$ Office has a drawback. A big one. Micro$oft submitted a patent application to protect their XML schemas. Does anyone know if it was granted [yet]? Unless|until someone sues to overturn that, Micro$oft is sitting pretty. Not only will someone have to take it into the courtroom, but legal fees will be involved; and Micro$oft has very deep pockets. Remember, 1/3 of their profit, not revenue, profit, comes from M$ Office.

You can read it all you want to and you can even pick it up and translate it. You just can't create one of your own. When you think about it, it's an excellent strategy. It keeps OpenSource from milking Micro$oft's ca$h cow. There are several open issues, including prior art. It will be an interesting case and even more interesting is what will Microsoft do if the patent is denied or revoked?


______________________________________
My Trunk Monkey can beat up your Trunk Monkey.
http://www.suburbanautogroup.com/ford/trunkmonkey. html

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Proteus]

If all your time is spent word-processing, I highly recommend learning keyboard shortcuts. In Word and OOo alike, they save many clicks. For instance: double spacing is Ctrl-2 in both applications.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[16K Ram Pack]

First, I'd never use a recommended word without double checking it elsewhere, regardless of the WP. If I've got a word wrong, I probably just got a typo and know the real word, anyway.

As for words missing, why not add them in, or submit them back to the OOo project?

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[flacco]

It's not ironic.

actually, it is ironic, regardless of any of your following statements.

"Word" is the de facto standard format.

the phrase "de facto standard" and the word "standard" are not synonymous, especially in computing. "word" is the de facto file format, due to ubiquity. it's not "the standard" word processing file format. there is no standard.

Incomplete support for the standard, no matter how flawed the standard itself may be,

the problem, of course, is not whether the standard is flawed or not. the problem is that the "standard" cannot possibly be a workable "standard" because the format itself isn't publicly documented anywhere.

is why we bitch at MS for IE's handling of CSS, among many other things.

CSS is completely publicly documented. IE's lack of compliance can only be ascribed to malicious intent on the part of MS. they had plenty of resources to fix the problem should they have wished to do so. but, they probably held a strategy meeting and inside of five minutes decided that the lock-in effect was well worth the lack of standards compliance. MS is contemptuous of standards.

No de jure standard is going to outweigh the de facto standard MS has created, whether we like it or not.

(putting aside the false comparison of a "de facto standard" and a "standard" for the moment...) had you used the present tense i would have agreed with you on that point. but awareness is growing over just how fucking retarded it is to lock away data in opaque proprietary formats. i'm willing to bet that if the document format becomes an ISO standard, and organizations in EU start requiring that document format, it will become the standard, and MS's proprietary undocumented formats will end up in the crapper, where they belong.

I wonder..

[Eriky]

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

Re:I wonder..

[antiMStroll]

Not only would they support it, they'd extend and enhance it!

Don't hold your breath

[goldspider]

"Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office."

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!

Re:Patent Threat?

[LousyPhreak]

ms patented?

the article is talking abou OO.o's xml format not the ms-proprietary one

Yeah, right.

[goofyheadedpunk]

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?!"

Thin end of the wedge

[wren337]

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.

Eh?

[NoInfo]

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.

Settlement...

[kaiwai]

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)

Re:Settlement...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Most people don't care about Open Source and making the file formats standard greatly helps with competition. It would mean that rival programs would be able to compete on a more level setting.
It would give people the choice to by any word processor they wanted as long as it supports file format x.
It there were a paint program that had >90% market share and all digital camera people had to purchase it, everyone would scream. But image programs can pretty much all use jpg, bmp, png, gif, tiff, etc. i.e. there is choice on file format.

OLE Embedding Re:Feature set?

[samjam]

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

Another small step

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cutting down on vendor lock-in

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well actually its as important what the dominant consumer does as the dominant vendor. If goverenments around the world want the standard, then they will use a standard compliant system. If that occurs, what MS does matters less. No leader can lead without followers.

Well...

[PhoenixFlare]

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.

Re:Well...

[octaene]

That's true, generally the home user doesn't care. But it is still very important for the sake of document interchange! Wouldn't it be cool if it never mattered what tool was used to save a document?

If I have the ability to create a document in OpenOffice.org and I send it to you, and you open it in Microsoft Word, add something, and then send it on to your buddy who is using StarOffice and nobody notices the difference, then that is powerful.

That's the point of open source and open standards: choice.

Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files

[shoppa]

I send out flat text files to co-workers, and they complain that they cannot open them because they don't have the appropriate reader on their (Microsoft) E-mail system. Yes, I know that notepad and Word and probably other applications can "open" a text file, but none of the defaults are set to do this automagically.

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?

Re:Standards and standards

[julesh]

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?

Not a lot. There are four good reasons for using OO.org:

1. Cross platform support -- this is pointless for the people you're talking about.
2. Zero up-front cost -- not a benefit to anyone who's willing to pirate MS's software
3. Access to source code, ability to make your own improvements -- not a benefit to anyone who isn't a programmer and would never consider hiring one
4. File format that is easy to write external tools to manipulate -- only useful if you have an unusual requirement that MS Office doesn't solve itself

I can't think of any other convincing reason to use OpenOffice.

Re:Bad decision.

[ThogScully]

I use pretty old machines and never noticed. I'm sure I'm not alone. My machines were maybe top of the line around the turn of the millennium and documents are saved and opened really quick, compared to things I used to do in Windows/Office.
-N

Government mandate is the only way

[georgep77]

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_

Re:to really lure people away from Office

[Dr. Evil]

OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between

This is a very important point which doesn't get stressed enough when people complain about MS office compatability.

Even different version of MS Office has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently... or a more appropriate comparison... even the same version of MS Office, for MacOS v.s. Windows has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently.

People also tend to rely heavily on the idiosyncracies of their local configuration (printer metrics, fonts, paper size) to align and layout their documents. An awful lot of people who write documents lack basic wordprocessing skills, yet they attempt complex desktop publishing tasks using a wordprocessor(!)

When these documents are converted into a different wordprocessor, it is no wonder that OOO can't match the nonsense arbitrary document layout ... it can't possibly know the idosyncracies of Bob's Win2k machine with a Lexmark printer, although it can attempt to match the idosyncracies of Bob's wordprocessor.

LaTeX

[Ardanwen]

For the people that want their documents to look good, latex is a very nice alternative to Word / OO.

Re:LaTeX

[Bob Uhl]

Graphing doesn't belong in a word processor any more than bitmap-creation does--it belongs in a graphing program. There are excellent graphing programs out there (gnuplot, R, Gnumeric, and Maxima are all good in different ways): do the graphing in them, and then include the images in your document.

LaTeX produces the most visually attractive documents out there--there's no reason not to use it.

Re:LaTeX

[OldSchoolNapster]

Graphing doesn't belong in a word processor any more than bitmap-creation does--it belongs in a graphing program.

There seems to be a recurring theme in posts comparing Windows/Office to their open source counterparts. If a feature is implemented by MS but not by the free alternative than that the feature is really there, just in a different (better;) form. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cobbling together the output of several different programs as much as the next guy but this is rediculous. Saying that features *don't* belong in a word processor, and that therefore the OSS word processor is just as good as MS's actually strikes me as a little sad.

Haveing used MS Word's spreadsheet, grahing and drawing tools on countless occasions I can't understand why somebody wouldn't want these features in their word processor unless they never use them. It's often useful to have full-fledged spreadsheets/charts embedded in your document that can be modified without a whole lot of copying, pasting,and reformating.

Re:Bad decision.

[julesh]

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 routinely edit documents that are in the region of 150-200 pages long in OpenOffice, and save times only exceed a second if my hard disk is in power-saving mode. It is, in fact, faster than MS Word. This is probably due to the fact that less disk I/O is required on the compressed file than on the hugely bloated MS one.

The problem, however, is that it doesn't support background saving. You can't carry on editing while it is performing the save, which you can with MS Word.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[Lumpy]

It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents.

not true. I rarely see a .DOC file in the company for ANY business documents, including files from outside the company.

I see PDF files as the defacto standard for communication.

PDF is the only file format that guarentees that anyone you send it to can read it.

I have not seen .DOC sent around for a long time. Granted, some silly people in Marketing, specifically the new ones, try to use .PPT files as their preferred communication style and document. but they get flamed to crispy death by most of sales and the entire IT department when they do.

Selling Open Office

[Silver Sloth]

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'

More important then you think.

[spectrokid]

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....

OOo Reader App!

[thepoch]

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.

A reader app is all we need! Email a .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).

Re:OOo Reader App!

[guardia]

Just save to PDF... then use PDF Reader.

Simple Idea

[BabyPanther]

Open office should include something that Microsoft and others have refused: an open standard for document rights management. I know. That seems counter to the open source culture, but it really isn't. Open source advocates don't trust DRM because it's usually not open source. So, if it is made open source and included in OO, then it would be a huge boost.

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.

This would help me

[NtroP]

We're still battling the WordPerfect -v- MS Office documnt format issue. Most people where I work now use MS Office, but we still have a few hold-outs that claim only WP will do what they want. This issue is exasserbated by the fact that we also have a lot of people still using AppleWorks as well.

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.

Re:I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

You did read the part about the european commision's involvement, didn't you? If those bureaucracies were to start using it then microsoft might be forced to support the format to do buisness.

Re:OASIS standard too?

[oxygene2k2]

a government contract will more likely refer to ISO standards..

"the supplier will provide x computers with office software preinstalled. the office software has to fully support the features outlined in ISO 1234/56 and read and write files as specified there."

microsoft can either stay away or support those formats - both is a win. with OASIS they might start to ligitate ("but OASIS is OOo centric, the specification for the contract is slanted for them!"), but ISO is pretty much regarded as being as independent as can get..

Re:LaTex over Office? Bwahahahahaha!

[stewby18]

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 a meaningless question--LaTeX is essentially a file format, whereas Word is both a GUI editor and a file format. Given a front-end equivalent to Word's that used LaTex source behind the scenes, do you think most people who use a word processor every day would say, "Gee, I don't want to use this because the binary blob XML format of Word is more comforting and familiar when I view it in pico?"

Legislation? long-term and public information

[dwheeler]

Once it's an ISO standard, I can easily imagine EU-wide legislation requiring that all government documents that (A) must be stored long-term, or (B) provided to the public, be provided in such a standard format.

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.

This won't matter to consumers... yet.

[signingis]

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.

Re:to really lure people away from Office

[gnu-generation-one]

"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"

That's your reason for not reccomending OpenOffice? It doesn't open encrypted files from a competing office suite

It's fair enough, but to be consistant, that would mean that you could never consider using MS-Office, as not only does it not open encrypted files from OpenOffice, but it doesn't open any OOo files at all!

Even if you 'rig' the contest so that you require MSO file-support, then OpenOffice still comes out ahead, as it reads that format, plus others which MSO doesn't support.

So the only option if you're trying to make OOo look unusable, is to find some even more obscure feature of MSO. "well it doesn't open encrypted files" (don't forget the DMCA), or "when you open ActiveX controls inside a spreadsheet in a powerpoint document, it doesn't display the column protection correctly". But when people say those sort of things, we hear what they really mean: "I'm going to use MS Office regardless, nyahhhhhhhh!"

Even the people who claim "it's what the rest of the world uses" are seeing their claims stretched to the limits of credibility. If you're so worried about losing a deal because your customers take offence at not being able to open whatever odd format they send you, then keep file-converters around - there's no need to let other people dictate what desktop software your company uses. Even between companies who've both standardised on MS-Office, there are still constant problems whenever someone emails documents from one to the other (normally someone with the very latest version and all the bells-n-whistles enabled, doesn't realise that it'll fail in all other versions of the same software).

Emailing documents without checking what the recipient's software supports just reminds me of dumb old modems trying to send at 57600bps to a computer listening at 112000bps, it's just a pathetic lack of communication between parties who should know better.

We all know the stories of secretaries sending emails with a .DOC attachment containing a few lines of text... frankly, these should be treated just like people who forward chain-letters or .EXE screensavers, and helped to select more efficient methods of exchanging information. Again, buying a $500 office suite for everyone in the company just because you have some CEO who doesn't know how to cut-n-paste is getting ridiculous.

Admittedly there's no particular benefit to doing the migration now for the sake of it, it's something to consider next time you think about general software upgrades. And because of the ease of overlapping the two systems (make OpenOffice available to those who want it, and later change the standard file-format over) there's no reason why any of the migration should be painful. And at the end of it, your organisation gets perpetual upgrades to their office-suite for free.

Re:Switching from Office

[jhoger]

If that would be useful, there's nothing to stop someone from developing a .sxw file converter for MS Word.

I like the tricky logic of it. Spread openoffice file format by allowing users to open files without forcing them to switch to openoffice. If the strategy works and the format catches on, that could reduce the lock-in factor.

Implementation matters!

[dwheeler]

You're quite correct, but you're missing an important factor: widespread inexpensive implementations.

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.

Re:wrong example

[krunk7]

Actually, the open office linest function outputs the data to a series of cells, which you than must plot. I know because I read the docs and fiddled with it. Getting the produced data to plot correctly was irritating. In MS, (haven't used it in a while) you just check a box in the graph set up and presto, it's plotted. You don't even have to read the docs.

Open Formats are CRITICAL

[Java Ape]

Open formats should be required for anyone whose work has relevance beyond the current month or year. Scientists, authors, medical staff all have records that need to persist and be readable over a period of years or decades. To commit these resources to the ephemeral whim of a closed standard, controlled by the caprice of it's creator is lunacy.

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.

Re:to really lure people away from Office

[MemoryDragon]

Well for instance, there are documents, which basically crash Microsoft office. Most of them have a few bytes broken or some kind of weird OLE stream. I have encountered more than once, that these broken documents could be loaded by OO alone and saved back.

If you move back and from the various office versions and you have some weird layouting stuff going on you can bet on having the same problems.

The same goes for really big documents, I am speaking of documents with a few hundred pages. MSO simply begins to choke after a while on those things, kills layouts starts to act weirdly, you have a chance to save the content by loading it into openoffice which handles big documents of booksize quite nicely without any problems.

(Btw. the german Ct magazine ran a stress test on modern word processors which included to handle a typical book size or PHd size situation. The result was devastating. Word, Ami/Word Pro, and Wordperfect failed totally at the task, with various problems, like killing the document, starting to act weirdly and so on. Wheres OpenOffice/StarOffice, Framemaker, and a bunch of smaller office suites and DTP Programs handled the task without any problem.

Sure this is not the standard office type situation where you handle mostly documents of a few pages, but, there are situations were authors and students forced into using unsuitable programs for such bigger tasks and then have to loose months because a word processor goes haywire under them.

Disagree: standards can be very good things

[dwheeler]

No, standards don't need to prevent you from improving a product. For one thing, widely-used standards usually get updated periodically. And this particular specification includes lots of ways to include additional information that's ignored unless the program can handle it (that opens things up for embrace-and-extend, but at least it deals with the problem you mentioned).

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