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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

The best thing about standards...

[provolt]

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

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.

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.

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.

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?!"

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..

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.

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.

Settlement...

[kaiwai]

This would be great! the EU *SHOULD* back this move by mandating that any Office Suite that is to be sold in the EU or used by any government within the EU MUST conform to that ISO specification.

That would EXCLUDE extensions, meaning, the format, if embrassed by Microsoft would have to be 100% ISO XML compliant - No embrace and extend for you! (Microsoft)

Re: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: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

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?

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_

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

[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: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.

-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....

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!

[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 ...

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.

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.

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: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.

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...

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.