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. "
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.
Businesses don't care about interoperability.
Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.
An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.
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
Your argument supports itself, but little else.
I will lure lots of people from Office, potentially. It's at least a step in the wrong direction toward bigger things.
Realistically, no big enterprise rollouts of Office are going to drop it in favor of OO.org just because of this, but those small mom'n'pop and small businesses out there that you conveniently ignore don't need Office. They mostly don't need even the bulk of OO.org's features really. They run Office because of lock-in and hopefully won't have to forever.
Those large businesses by the way probably love ISO standards. What if ISO standards dictate that any ISO 9001 certified company must maintain all its data in open formats - it's a stretch just now, but I see a lot of huge companies who love to put banners on their buildings bragging of being ISO 9001 certified.
This may have an influence enough that MS adds the ISO standard formats to Office, then OO.org really has no barriers to the majority of the Office market that doesn't need anything from Office but the file filters.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
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.
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!
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.
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...