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.

Comments

Re:Righto Mate

[PincheGab]

Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284

Stability

[scrote-ma-hote]

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.

Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Crispin Cowan]

I love the open document format concept. I think it is vitally important. I can't believe that enterprises and governments are willing to store critical archival documents in Microsoft Office format, and put them selves at risk of being unable to open these documents as little as 10 years hence.

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

The sad thing is...

[beeglebug]

... 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.

Re:The sad thing is...

[bladesjester]

Because, for whatever reason, most people specifically ask for doc and xls files. They tend to get snippy when you send them pdfs.

When dealing with buisnesses that you wish to continue dealing with in a positive manner (be it for commerce, looking for a job, or any other reason), you try not to do things to annoy them overmuch. Just shrug, show them what they want to see while you do what needs to be done in the background. Most of them will be happy as long as they get the results that they wanted and what *they* see is what they expected to (there are exceptions to this, but as a general rule it's not a bad guideline).

How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[CdBee]

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)

Suddenly you have an alternative to the traditional recipe of using .Doc files and the free MS Word Viewer to distribute written documents.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Cecil]

Not necessarily true. Reverse-engineering XML (at least, XML that is not purposely obfuscated) is orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering binary formats, because it is a self-descriptive format. Each piece of data has a name associated with it automatically -- the name of the tag -- as well as a rough structure (clearly this 'size' is for font size, not page size, since it's within a font tag). And just as importantly, XML tells you exactly where an 'array' of items ends because it has a /tag. With a binary format, the count for the array will typically precede the array, but does not have to... in a particularly complex format the length of the array can be implied by other parameters, and you have to use multiple samples to find out how exactly it is implied where it ends, and even when you think it's figured out it probably isn't, and the files that don't fit your assumptions will crash or produce garbage when read in.

A proprietary XML file is not at all proprietary compared to a binary file. They're easy for even a novice programmer to figure out how to read.

50 years from now

[mslinux]

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.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[arendjr]

I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:

• Namespaces. XML allows you to use different XML schema's within one document. This makes it possible to embed for instance SVG data within an OpenOffice.org document (which it actually does if you're adding images). So, no need to reinvent the wheel here.
• XSL. A technique making it possible to transform a document from one XML schema to another with very little programming effort. This makes XHTML export and import/export filters for Office 2003 XML files much less of a hassle. Again, this is actively being taken advantage of by OpenOffice.org. No need to reinvent all the parsing and generation code again.

To say the fact they're documenting the format it is more important than the fact it's in XML is true, but that doesn't make it unimportant they're using XML.

Not to be negative but...Looke here.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.