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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. "
Can the ISO standardize an MS-Patented way of saving documents??!!
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.
This kind of move cuts down on vendor lock-in if and only if the dominant vendor (in this case m$) chooses to conform to the standard rather than do their own thing. So don't hold your breath.
I am officially gone from
Why? Businesses don't care about interoperability. They care about integration around business practices, workflow, rights management and collaboration.
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need, not mom-n-pop or real small businesses that don't actually manage their best practices.
I know I'm going to get modded into the toilet for saying it, but this is from years of experience in enterprise applications. OpenOffice might get there some day, but not until the people working on it and with applications around it are people who actually have made a living building advanced Fortune-50 caliber integrated information systems.
Standard /. conspiracy theory follows : It's all a plot by Microsoft.
ISO can tie a standard down in a tangled mess of beaurocracy ; while this might bring credibility it also runs the risk of preventing OOo evolving its formats as fast as it would like to.
Which is something that M$ sure would like, as OOo is now getting to the point where it can start to compete with MS Office.
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
Well, it depends on what happens afterwards. Government bodies usually request all electronic documents given to them to be in a standard format. If there actually WOULD be an ISO norm format for office documents, you can bet that government agencies (and large companies that exchange documents with them) will want to use such a format.
This could possibly even force MS hand into complying with this format (or at least offer REALLY good import/export filters for these formats).
I don't worry too much about proprietary software and closed source, but where data longevity is concerned I do care. Have you ever taken a look at those SXW word processor files? They're just ZIP archives containing several XML files, one for style, one for content, etc. Extracting the data from OO's data files is easy to do.
And how many people actually use those features?
Enough use individual features that it makes it impossible (or difficult) for those users to switch away. Each niche feature may only appeal to a small % of users, but taken collectively, there are a much larger number of those users who depend on those features too much to move away.
Additionally, it's not even about features for many people - it's about compatibility. Many of my family members use MSOffice at their offices and won't switch because the cost of converting and testing their Excel macros is too much to justify the conversion. And that's being generous assuming that 100% of what needs to be achieved in Excel via macros *could* be accomplished via StarBasic or whatever it's called in ooo.
creation science book
Most use it becuase it is what is familiar and they have heard that everyone else uses MS Office.
.doc in MS Works. I have seen idiots refuse .rtf docs because they could not figure out how to open them in Word. They would open in Wordpad if they double clicked on them.
Most people do not have any idea how to save in a format other than the default. I have seen people insist on using MS Office because they did not want to learn how to use "save as" to save an essay for class in
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
In Linux I tried Gnumeric (nice and coming along fast, but still not even up to par) and OpenOffice (not even close).
And no, it had nothing to do with "being familar with the Excel way". I'd never needed to perform spreadsheet tasks before...it took me quite a while of reading docs to figure out how to even do a linear regression that looked nice in the GNU alternatives whereas it's a matter of 2 clicks of the mouse in Excel.
Your preaching to the choir when it comes to me and open source, but MS has the best office suite around............period.
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.
That's a good point, but it relates to legislative compliance, not standards compliance. At least not directly.
An EU mandate would represent a much larger stick than an ISO standard represents a carrot.
When you are building a software platform to handle business best practices and workflow, the format your data is in really doesn't matter. Companies do not build these large scale applications themselves, they have integrators doing it or buy pre-integrated packages.
OO's system can't do 1/10th of the stuff Office 2003 is capable of doing where collaboration, workflow, process management and other important technologies are concerned.
Sure its got Java API's applications can be built with, but until someone builds a framework whereby you can actually do the stuff these businesses are wanting to do going forward, the API's are just that. Interfaces. Not applications.
There seems to be this opensource mentality of not "build a better application" but rather "lets beat Microsoft!". Thats going to get the opensource community nowhere, because very few people working in it have visibility into what these enterprises are actually doing across the board, and have very little visibility into the kind of big guns MS is readying to be able to meet those needs.
OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball. Can it meet those needs? Of course. But not until, as I said, the people pushing the development of these applications understand where they need to go to really compete. The future isn't about office suites and file formats, its about having all the business applications working together, so the processes a business has to follow day by day can be automated.
MS isn't the only company working on the frameworks and tools to enable that, IBM is putting a lot of research into it, too. What OO needs is IBM to throw its weight behind it, because Sun doesn't get it and has never gotten it.
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?
Features I use everyday that OO doesn't have:
1. A spell checker that doesn't suck. I have found numerous REAL dictionary included words that OO doesn't recognize. Furthermore, OO has problems with spell checker word recommendations. Often it gives me horrible suggestions for my mispellings, MSFT WORD does much better under the same recommendations.
2. NO GRAMMAR CHECK!!!
I switched to OO because I hate supporting the MSFT, but when I started writing my documents in OO and then editing them in MSFT WORD I realized it was time to switch back.
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.
Outlook Calendar, for one. Sunbird just isn't there yet. Any other suggesstions for server based calendaring programs are welcome.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
>> Yeah, StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don't have the features that Word does.
> Which features?
I prefer OO.org myself, but here's a short list of a few problems I've found
- Word Art doesn't display or print correctly.
- Table of Contents is cut off in an imported Word Doc.
- No way to search for 2 consequitive enter/returns without some plugin that is slow, and doesn't work properly. (Find / Special Characters really needs to be implemented properly and natively.)
- Copying formatting is not the same as word. In word, you include the Paragraph marker. In OO.org you exclude it.
- Resetting Page Number in an already formatted document is quirky. You have to monkey around to get it to work properly.
OO.org is getting there, slowly. Fortunately, the above bugs/mis-features aren't a show stopper for me.
--
Original, Fun Palm games by the Lead Designer of Majesty!
http://www.arcanejourneys.com/
A lot of people say that and to be honest I never understood. I moved away from spreadsheet graphing back in the days when I was still using Excel. The graphs never worked the way I needed them to. At first I went for Grapher, and later to gnuplot. Batch graphing is way more useful.
Reformatting 100+ graphs by changing a single file when your supervisor thinks that the graphs should look like "this" instead... o, no, let's make it "this" now... beats any other approach. Of course, when I have a bit of free time, I work on an OpenOffice macro to handle gnuplot calls transparently so that drawing a graph ends up being as easy as in Excel. I'll post it on sourceforge when I'm done... probably after I'm done with my thesis and have serious time to work on it, say in 6 to 9 months from now.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Using Excel for school level science may be acceptable but as the UK NPL and others have found, Excel is the one that is not up to par, Gnumeric is greatly superior and scientists should not blindly trust the software they use anyway - especially when the only way to verify it's reliability is to treat it to empirical scientific investigation itself, amusing though that may be.
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.
Nobody? I sent out mine at least a dozen times in PDF format and only one person had a problem (a pimp^W recruitment agency) whose IT system was so bad I ended up handing them a printed copy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
PDF is nice, but there are catches...
.sxw. So imagine having to email a bigger file. I already hate people who insist on emailing .doc files without compressing it with winzip, 7-zip, or even the built-in one in WinXP. Compressing .doc can at most times save 50%! Sure with broadband everywhere why bother right? Still, a little saved is better than being plenty wasteful.
1. PDF is usually bigger than the original
2. What if that person wanted to suddenly edit the file? If it were PDF, then he'd have to buy a fairly expensive piece of software like Adobe Acrobat. Normally, when we email a document file, it's for editting. When it's for viewing in final form, then PDF may be appropriate and should be put on a web server for everyone who needs it to download. Emailing something usually is for collaboration with others for editing.
3. So again, what if that person wanted to edit the file? I could probably give him a copy of OpenOffice.org, he installs it, then edits it right there and then. No having to wait for me to email it again because I sent it first in PDF.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to find excuses to sort of "flame" you. I'm just saying there are practical uses to both file formats. Besides, a reader app creates mind-share. It makes people realize that there's another application there worth using. Just as people suddenly realize there's this thing called Adobe Acrobat, simply because they have used something like Adobe Reader.
Or I may just be going psycho with all this. I do hope someone capable thinks "hey I'll start a reader project now". I'd be glad to help in anyway I can.
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...
It's not ironic. "Word" is the de facto standard format. Incomplete support for the standard, no matter how flawed the standard itself may be, is why we bitch at MS for IE's handling of CSS, among many other things. No de jure standard is going to outweigh the de facto standard MS has created, whether we like it or not.
I hated pdfs until Preview came about.
This is...
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along a similar vein - a lightweight OOo standalone print engine would be nice...
...
as a developer (primarily business apps)... an xml document format is much more flexible than the usual Word way of doing things (instantiate a word instance and modify the document etc...) - being able to use xsl/java/vb against the xml document then simply calling a lightweight engine to print (or convert to pdf) would be enormously handy
Actually the WP format has always been well documented and available via SDK from WP/Novell/Corel. As a result many many tools handle WP format
I'm not saying an ISO-blessed standard may not be a good thing - it is, but WP files are unlikely to ever have the issues that MSO can have.
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.
Never said that it's not. Which is why I use LaTeX. No copying, no pasting, no reformatting: I just change the source file and regenerate the .dvi. That's among the nice things offered by LaTeX.
This is an interesting approach... I work for a small company currently doing software work in both the pharma (including FDA 21 CFR Part 11) space and the banking space. Though I don't think these standards currently address in what format the documentation must be captured, if they did, the impact would be significant.
This would not just force Microsoft to start supporting these open standards, but it would have the same effect on a bunch of other companies, for example Seagate (maker of Crystal Reports). Not to mention the myriad producers of custom software for pharma and banking companies.
Read my keyboard review.
Spell checkers may be no substitute for learning to spell but they can be efficient time savers when one's vocabulary failed to come prepackaged with a infallible spelling guide. You don't have to use a spell checker to check for poor spelling. It's entirely possible to use one to check for better spelling.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
I am sure you think it is a bad habit.
As non-native english speaker I can
(1) not spell english as good as I would want to, and
(more importantly)
(2) not distinguish between american and british spelling. Of course I am learning, but it does take time. This is a thing spell checkers are good at. (point (2) I mean).
Depends, I havent had any single problem by sending out PDF resumes so far. I also refused to apply for a job online where the webpage said, only doc format. Instead I printed my pdfs out and sent it via snail mail.