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Why OpenOffice.org? Open Document Formats

Posted by timothy on from the file-formats-rule-the-world dept.

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.

3 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad by Crispin+Cowan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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

  2. Re:Who cares if its XML? by arendjr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Not to be negative but...Looke here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.