Slashdot Mirror
Why OpenOffice.org? Open Document Formats
Jem Berkes writes "In this current article about OpenOffice.org (also covered at Linux Today), I try to make a point about OpenOffice's commitment to open document formats and interchange as the strongest selling point - never mind cost. The OOo developers are putting a lot of effort into their XML format; will this pay off, and will users notice the significance of OpenDocument/OASIS document formats?" This can't be said enough: file formats are what determine whether and how easily data is portable, or whether the user is just stuck.
Why no SVG support, then?
Someone had to do it.
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284
I wish people would stop touting stability as a superiority of software products. I use OO and MS Office regularly, and both have crashed on me, or done very flaky things, such as refusing to save a file for some unknown reason. I'm a more than average user, but not some elitist who has configured my machine perfectly, and if I can't get things not to crash, then your average user isn't going to be able to either. They'll try the program, excited by it's superior crash record, it'll crash once, and then they'll get burned, blame the software and never try again. There's plenty of good reasons to use OSS software, but stability wise, it's no better, and note no worse, in my books than an MS product.
Its funny how a free piece of software like OpenOffice.org can out-do Microsoft Office. Every format that Office produces can be read by OOo but anytime you try opening a non-Office-formatted document in Office, it freaks out and asks you to define the encoding. But it doesn't have a single encoding that will work, ever. Yes, regular text and even RTF can be opened by Office but the point is Office just can't handle anything that wasn't originally created by MS.
"You see them trees out back, I take care of them. I'm a tree, I'm a tree wizard." - Crazy Homeless Guy
However I have tried hard to switch to OpenOffice. Even our business people have tried to use it. And the sad truth is that it just sucks. There is no way in hell that OpenOffice competes with Microsoft Office for usability. The PowerPoint clone is especially weak: in PP, common buttons like "make the font bigger" are prominently displayed, while in OO you have to hunt hard for the button in the customization menus, and even then it doesn't work right.
This is not to say that OO is not a valuable asset. Clearly a lot of people have worked hard on it. But don't kid ourselves, this beast has a long way to go yet just to compete with MS Office 97, never mind 2003.
Crispin
... almost every file I save in Open Office gets saved as a .doc/.xls rather than an OOo format (I can't even think of the file extensions of the top of my head, thats how infrequently I use them). If the file I am saving has to be sent to anyone, or opened on a machine other than my own, I have to go with Microsoft compatability, even though it annoys me intensly.
Write a Firefox Extension that enables OpenOffice documents to be viewed in the browser, or edited if OOo is present on the system? (yes, this would be a lot of work)
.Doc files and the free MS Word Viewer to distribute written documents.
Suddenly you have an alternative to the traditional recipe of using
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
"The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless... "
To those who don't understand XML, but that's OK. We love you in spite of your faults.
Open, well-documented formats will allow governments and businesses to access documents/info many years from now. It's unfortunate that most IT managers don't realize how closed formats will hinder them in the future.
One of the largest problems I have had with coworkers/friends/family when they switch to OO.o is the document format. Sure, it works great on their own computer, and even takes up less space. However, I was phoned at one o'clock in the morning from a Kinko's because someone had to print up a report and the computers there didn't have OO.o.
.sxw format be the default will help OO.o get into the mainstream. However, this is faulty logic. The person I talked about above ended switching back to MS Office because she just wanted things to work all the time. Even though she had no previous problems with OO.o, and I explained to her that you _could_ save in .doc format, she switched anyway. Her words: "I just can't stand being stranded."
The problem (IMO) with OO.o is that it saves the documents in its own format by default. Sure, you can select to save it to any number of formats, but most people just type it a name and check "OK." This leads to many, many problems when it comes time to interact with other computers.
Some might say that having the
I think that the open source community should really take those words to heart. If OS wants to grow, developers are going to have to step away from their niche market of people who really care about software being free and all that jazz. People just want things to work.
There's SVG support. It's just not particularly good.
http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm
However someone is working on it, and there's enough documentation out there, you can too.
"XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format..."
I'd say that's a pretty good reason right there, especially compared to a non-human-readable one (MS).
But that doesn't really matter, does it? It takes up less space, for the same amount of user effort, which is really the only important metric in office apps.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
People tend not to 'upgrade', usually every 3 years when the computers are replaced, people get the latest Windows and Office on it. Which happens to be WinXP and Office2k3.
I have to say the most impressive thing about Office is VBA. It works in all Office apps and is very very simple yet exceedingly powerful. Any replacement needs perfect VBA understanding.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
I mean, really. The article is very terse, and says nothing that hasn't been beaten to death on Slashdot every month or so.
Heck, if the article had even been somewhat comprehensive, I wouldn't have minded. But it appears to me that this article was approved simply to get Open Office more exposure (with nothing new promised).
Beetle B.
Ok, so the great innovators at Microsoft patented using XML to store a word processing document.
If you are going to take into account all things that have been patented you can well stop developing software altogether (I found your comment informative, anyway, sorry if I sounded offensive).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Whether or not a file format is closed or open, isn't what's going to drive users preferences. Users generally don't care.
The place where the open oo format can rule, is by integrating its use with other open software. Things like, an Apache server that can *create* the document format based on data it holds. By writing php scripts that can output their data directly into spreadsheets that contain formulas etc. Imagine a web application that allows the user to modify the spreadsheet online, without having to download/upload the whole thing. Think collaboration. This is where MS is trying to get too.
The power lies in finding the advantage of documented file formats. But, the first step is creating and documenting them. We just don't have that *killer* app yet.
The OpenOffice format is being standardised by OASIS and the KOffice developers have decided to use it as the native format in future.
Even if they required MS office on the conversion machine (for mass conversions). Yes, even OOo doesn't handle everything perfectly and has to deal with a moving target.
.DOC email attachments, despite good efforts to educate.
Part of the problem in migration (last I checked) was no nice and reliable way to massivly convert the piles of ms office files to OOo. If users would find a DOC file they'd just go hunting for a machine with word on it. They would also freak out dealing with
If the users only saw properly rendered OOo files, this problem of adoption would disappear.
Ideally I'd love to see something that would search a whole network for ms office docs and convert them, archive the ms office files as originals and only leave OOo files 'easily' accessable. I'd write one but my skills in this type of thing are too rusty at the moment.
Firefox &
In the real world civil suits usually end in settlements that leave both parties more or less where they began. There is compensation for damages, but life goes on.
It is a waste of time to dwell upon an argument that fundamentally leads nowhere.
There is a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, between implementing "buzzword compliance" and actually encoding the structure of an object in XML. I can see how publishers of proprietary programs could abuse the letter of the W3C Recommendations by having their programs shove a base64 encoded binary in an undocumented format into an XML element and then trying to sell their programs using a misleading claim that the result benefits from being XML. Should that practice become commonplace, W3C will probably issue a release that strongly deprecates that practice, if it hasn't already.
I don't understand why people feel like pointing this out. Sure, yes, it's a zipped file. It's compressed but.. It's still the format. It's akin to someone shooting down FLAC, even though it's about half the size of WAV, just because, well, it's compressed. Open Office.org's format results in smaller files than Word's. And there you have it.
Or heck, maybe I'm totally off, in which case feel free to alert me to that fact. However, that's how it seems to me.
[Trojan.]
This sounds like it may be important for historical and archival uses, too, where you want to keep your older documents over time and not have to worry about them becoming useless bits.