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?

[beh]

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).

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?

[bigberk]

What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office.

I use OO for everything because I think it is better than MS Office. Most importantly, it runs on several platforms - whether I'm on a Windows desktop, Linux desktop, or Sun UNIX station I can edit and print the same documents. Second (touching on the article's issue) I know that the data stored in OpenOffice's files will have superior longevity to any proprietary solution.

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[mgkimsal2]

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.

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?

[magefile]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[magefile]

RTFA. They recommended that MS make their formats open by submitting them to standards bodies; stop using non-XML formats (only some stuff is currently XML); and (I think) read OO.o files. So they didn't twist MS's arm, but they did encourage the release of those formats.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[mantera]

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.

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?

[swv3752]

Most use it becuase it is what is familiar and they have heard that everyone else uses MS Office.

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 .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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[krunk7]

Excel, graphing. I'm a linux user and for chem. labs we had to plot data sets for our weekly lab reports. Using Excel this was a trivial task which required absolutely no knowledge of the inner workings of the spreadsheet to produce really nice looking reports.
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.

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?

[dorward]

Outline mode! That floating navigator is lame.

The navigator is fantastic, I love it. (And it is only floating by default, it docks quite happily).

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[hwestiii]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[garcia]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Sique]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Aceto3for5]

Microsoft Pricetag(tm) and Microsoft HardToOpenBox (tm). Those kinda features.

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?

[ServeYourWorld]

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.

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?

[AsbestosRush]

Outlook Calendar, for one. Sunbird just isn't there yet. Any other suggesstions for server based calendaring programs are welcome.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[UnknownSoldier]

>> 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/

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[theguyfromsaturn]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Wolfbone]

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.

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?

[kayak334]

Excel, for thechnical graphs? you are joking right? If you had said Microcal Origin or Sigma Plot I might have taken you seriously, but Excel?

I don't know how "technical" you consider a chemistry lab for school, but Excel actually does a wonderful job at making lab graphs for a lot of students.

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?

[tmasssey]

Actually, the reason for the memory dump (serialized objects, IIRC) was for document load speed.

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... ;)

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[ari_j]

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.

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?

[fiftyfly]

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.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Why would this lure them away?

[Fla]

I actually pasted your post into Word just to see what it would suggest. I'll have you know that "yourself" should actually be "you", and "checker's" should be plain old "checkers".

So you see, Word's grammar checker actually can be helpfu... uh... nevermind.

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.

The best thing about standards...

[provolt]

The best thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from!

Patent Threat?

[jobsagoodun]

Can the ISO standardize an MS-Patented way of saving documents??!!

Re:Patent Threat?

[LousyPhreak]

ms patented?

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

Re:Patent Threat?

[Anita Coney]

There is no patent threat here. Sun is immune.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17627

Re:Patent Threat?

[MemoryDragon]

Yes they do but, the openoffice is the prior art to this. The openoffice file format existed long before Microsoft even applied for the patent.

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..

[Lord_Slepnir]

Kind of how like how Microsoft (please, don't ever use 'M$') obeys ANSI C standards in VC, like how they oben the W3C html standards in Internet Explorer.

How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.

Re:I wonder..

[antiMStroll]

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

Re:I wonder..

[IntergalacticWalrus]

> How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.

No they don't. Microsoft never explicitely creates standards. Instead they would use their global monopoly to force darkness into being mainstream. Once it is done, all light sources become unused by the general public and slowly die from lack of user base, even though they were superior to darkness in the first place.

Standards and standards

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Standards and standards

[cbiltcliffe]

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?

Call the BSA on their ass? Once they get a few million dollar fine for using "free" proprietary software, they'll probably not be such a fan of it anymore... (Only partly joking...)

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:Standards and standards

[shis-ka-bob]

Tell them what they are doing in immoral. It is not acceptable to user MS Office without obeying its license.

Remind that that it is not only immoral, but it is also illegal. They have almost certainly given Microsoft permission to look at the contents of thier hard drive (in order to get patches), so Microsoft can figure out who has legal and illegal copies of thier software. As the record companies have shown, large corporations can find it in their interest to 'make examples' of a few individuals who pirate software.

Remind your friends that illegal copying costs Microsoft much more than Linux. Microsoft is quite willing to play hardball with Linux. So, it seems like they could also start to play hardball with users that illegally copy software. This is especially the case if Microsoft starts to have a hard time meeting revenue projections. Microsoft must keep growing if they are to meet Wall Street expectations. This may well force Microsoft to go after piracy as hard as they go after Linux.

Then remind them that OpenOffice is functional and that they are encouraged to use it for free. The developers want them to use it for free. In short, remind them that being immoral has its own costs even if you don't get caught. Then give them a moral high road; most of us want to do the right thing.

to really lure people away from Office

[Exter-C]

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.

Re:to really lure people away from Office

[MemoryDragon]

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.

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.

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: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.

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!

Cutting down on vendor lock-in

[dkleinsc]

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.

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.

It won't lure anyone from Office

[tgd]

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.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[julesh]

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.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[ThogScully]

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

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.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[Spoing]

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

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.

1. [...] 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.

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.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

[dougmc]

They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.

To be fair, it's not completely FUD. There are still documents that neither OpenOffice nor AbiWord can read at all, let alone properly. Between the two, I can do most documents, but not all.

I know this because I'm a Linux user in a company full of Windows machines and users. .doc files are sent all over the place, I pop my mail off the Exchange server, I mount the corporate shares with smbfs, I use pptp to use the Microsoft VPN server ...

... but unfortunately, I still have to use rdesktop to connect to a Windows box to occasionally read some of the documents sent around.

lure people from using Microsoft Office.?

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

lure people from using Microsoft Office.

Then what will I do to get my morning Clippy Fix.

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.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[Carthag]

It is possible to do this, at least in a corporate environment that uses common installs or images. This method is for 8.0, but I'm sure it's possible ith other versions too.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0 \W ord\Default Save]
"Name"="Default Format"
"Value"="SEE BELOW"

Where it says SEE BELOW, insert one of the following (or google for other options, there are many):
(nothing) (default, Word 8.0)
HTML
Text (ascii encoded text)
Unicode (text format with unicode encoding)
rtf

We did this while transitioning to WordPerfect (with the code WrdPrfctWin) when I worked at an unnamed government institution in Denmark.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[claar]

Hmm.. upon googling, the top link sent me to a microsoft documentation piece telling me how to set the default save format (Pretty tough; Tools->Options->Save->"Save Word files as" drop box). Works like a charm in my MS office XP (2002) install. You can even use the System Policy Editor to set it organization wide. So I guess we've got All we need to break the Office monopoly.. woo hoo! Or not..

I know what would do it...

[Aceto3for5]

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.

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.

Could be a cunning ploy to hobble OOo.

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Could be a cunning ploy to hobble OOo.

[McCall]

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.

This wouldn't happen. There isn't anything to stop the OOo developers from starting an OOo v2 document format with new features, but still retain the OOo ISO options within OOo.

The OOo v2 document format could then go on to form the a new updated ISO format, and the OOo developers could then add the new features to the OOo v3 format... repeat until nausea.

OASIS standard too?

[eGuy]

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?

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..

Microsoft

[bunburyist]

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.

I beg to differ

[Underholdning]

"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.

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)

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

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:Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files

[PhoenixFlare]

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.

I don't know what your co-workers are using, but my copy of Win XP (and 2000, and 98, and 95 before that) and the various versions of Outlook i've used all opened text files just fine in Notepad without any fuss - always have, never had to change anything.

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:Government mandate is the only way

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Government mandate is the only way

[MemoryDragon]

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.

and that is what this is for

[jeif1k]

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.

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

[Coryoth]

Honestly, after hearing the buzz about latex, I went and looked at it. Unless you're doing print setting for professional use, it's far too complicated and powerful.

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 put

\summary{bullet point summary of what follows...}

at 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.

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:LaTeX

[Bob Uhl]

But why would I use a half-assed tool when better ones exist? Sure, one can drive a screw with a hammer, but the results aren't gonna be pretty.

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.

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.

they may have to

[jeif1k]

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.

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'

-1 Wrong

[brunes69]

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?

Re:-1 Wrong

[42forty-two42]

Actually it's a .zip not a .tar.gz. Other than that, you're correct.

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....

Re:More important then you think.

[SlipJig]

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.

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.

Re:OOo Reader App!

[thepoch]

PDF is nice, but there are catches...

1. PDF is usually bigger than the original .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.

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.

Re:OOo Reader App!

[This is outrageous!]

show me one PDF reader that doesnt have an ugly interface or take nine years to proccess something like scrolling.

I hated pdfs until Preview came about.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
17033 Acrobat Re 0.0% 0:02.18 1 55 311 6.16M 24.6M 17.1M 140M
17032 Preview 0.0% 0:00.32 1 54 113 968K 6.09M 4.21M 109M

Re:OOo Reader App!

[madhippy]

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 ...

Starry-eyed optimism

[JessLeah]

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

*steals rose-tinted spectacles* Yoink!

Re:Tell me...

[tgd]

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.

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.

Standardization already underway

[Florian]

In fact, the Openoffice XML format has already been submitted as the base of an open XML-based standard for office documents not to ISO, but to OASIS, see the coverage in Wikipedia. A draft version of the OASIS Open Office XML format already exists, and once the official version 1.0 is out, both Openoffice (the program) and other free software office suites such as KOffice will switch to it as their native file format (as covered, for example, in this Linux Journal article).

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.

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:This would help me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OLE

[955301]

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.

Re:OLE

[fiftyfly]

Weel there is the data sources manager. It allows you to reference all kinds of dbs & socuments as data sources, even spreadsheets.

Switching from Office

[ajs318]

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.

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 ..... but not necessarily!

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.

Re:Switching from Office

[ajs318]

Microsoft have already demonstrated their unwillingness to compete on any terms whatsoever. Microsoft tolerate wide-scale piracy of their software -- they would rather have you running a pirated copy of MS Office than a legit copy of some small-time workalike -- and this forces independents out of the closed-source arena {not that I have any sympathy for them; a hoarding bastard is still a hoarding bastard and just because some other hoarding bastard is shitting on them doesn't make their hoarding any less bastardish. Being a victim does not automatically make you blameless}.

The "re-training" thing is largely a myth anyway. All the typing keys -- letters, numbers and punctuation -- are still going to be in the same place, and the greatest single challenge inherent in creating any document consists of pressing them in the right order.

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.

It's about Salesguys

[superpulpsicle]

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.

wrong example

[an_mo]

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)

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.

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?"

gunzip xml format for cvs!!

[drbart]

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.

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.

Adobe seems to support it.

[Isldeur]

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...

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:Tell me...

[maxpublic]

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.

Really? Exactly what do you base this assumption on? Are you personally acquainted with the people working on OpenOffice? Or did you just pull this out of your ass?

OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball.

Ah, definitely pulling this out of your ass. I just love it when someone fronts a baseless personal opinion as fact; it immediately identifies the egomaniacs amongst us.

But not until, as I said, the people pushing the development of these applications understand where they need to go to really compete.

I'm pretty sure they have a much better idea of what needs to be done than you do.

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.

Ah, you're in marketing! No wonder you think your own spew is canon!

Max

6 clicks? Use the keyboard shortuts instead.

[Kaimelar]

Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six).

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.

Re:planmaker? msoffice==expensive!

[Richard Dick Head]

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.

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.

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.

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