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

Righto Mate

[fire-eyes]

Till people read this: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284

Re:Righto Mate

[PincheGab]

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

Re:Righto Mate

[marcello_dl]

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).

Re:Righto Mate

[cryogenix]

Hello PRIOR ART... :) Microsoft was late to XML like it was late to the internet. I mean how many versions has Word Perfect had XML support for now?

Re:Righto Mate

[70Bang]

Let's have some prior art to this statement. ;)

Several of us have maintained for quite some time [that] Microsoft wanted to patent their XML format so something such as OpenOffice can't write to MS Office. You can see the format, read the format, but not write the format. Frustrate the geeks. (don't think this happened by mistake in Redmond)

It also forces the business-end of decisions when it comes to migrating away from MS Office.
Noone is going to move from one app to another overnight in a large environment, no matter how good or inexpensive the proposition. This means a one-way bridge...everyone who moves across can't come back just as their material can't come back.

Why is Microsoft so touchy about MS Office? It represents [at least] 1/3 of their profit (not revenue, profit). They have to protect their cash cow someway until they can supplement it with another pass-the-hat release of Windows.

Pass-the-hat as in what they did with 98SE, ME as intermediate releases of 98 before XP was done cooking. Add a couple of changes, pass the hat around, those who buy anything new will pay and the revenue stream increases a little bit. This is why the mags are jumping on XP-to-Longhorn intermediate releases - more income until Longhorn is done.

Re:Righto Mate

[iwan-nl]

According to an earlier /. story, the MS/Sun agreement had a special provision that lets Microsoft sue anybody, including Sun, over OpenOffice.org. Does anyone else think this provision was included by MS to be able to use this "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML" patent to sue OOo adopters in New Zealand?

Sam Hiser, OpenOffice.org - interviewed at LW

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a cool interview with Sam Hiser of OpenOffice.org here

Re:Sam Hiser, OpenOffice.org - interviewed at LW

[j-pimp]

Wow, does he mention when the OpenOffice version of Access and InfoPath come out? Once we have those I'll migrate. I mean, it has been 5 years at least. Can't comment on infopath being I never used it and I don't know what it does.

I've never heard of OO making an Access replacement. Out of curiosity what would you want said Access replacement to do. SQLite Gives you an embedded database engine that stores a database in a single file. Do you just want a GUI frontend to SQLite?

Not to be negative but...

[skids]

Why no SVG support, then?

Who cares if its XML?

[PincheGab]

The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless... XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format... For may things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal (ie, databases, binary data, etc...).

The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[mrjb]

True. If you've bothered to check, you'll note that the folks at OOo are keeping their XML format documented.

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.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[MrBandersnatch]

OMG the parent was modified up as insightful!!!

The point of XML isnt that its human readable. Its that its machine PARSIBLE and that one can use a rather large number of tools in order to process the CONTENT without having to deal with all the proprietary ***** that is normally in there.

Being able to apply XSL alone on a document means it incredibly simplifys the process of converting from one format to another WITHOUT having to learn YA proprietary format/tools.

And to give you an idea of the value of this - Ive just spent 3 weeks converting a LARGE word document to XHTML (properly, i.e. its accessible, well formed etc etc). If this document had been written in OO (or if it had been possible to import it into OO without OO having convulsions on many of the tables), Id easily have shaved a week off that work.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[ticktockticktock]

<data>
AAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBBBBB BBCCCCCCCCCCDDDDDDDDDDDD
</data>

Someone could wrap a binary file with XML tags. Is it suddenly more readable than before?

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Jakosa]

You are right, still XML is a hard hitting buzz word that has the attention of the politicians. XML and open formats have been synonymous at least in my country (Denmark) where open formats is something no politicians talk against (as opposed to open source).

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Ark42]

Quick test / shameless plug: Try to decode the file format for the saved layouts from http://www.morpheussoftware.net/ anybody.

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.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[uits]

You spent 3 weeks converting a word document to XHTML? Even if it was absolutely huge, I don't see how you can end up spending that much time unless you were manually tweaking the same things, page by page. How did you go about doing it?

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[IO ERROR]

That it's XML isn't completely meaningless. There are all kinds of tools out there for working with XML, so even without OOo, you can still access your documents. It's the availability - or just the possibility - of alternate tools to work with those documents that makes XML the best choice for an office data format.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[kfg]

XML is not a file format. It is a text markup language.

The file format of OOo XML files is gzipped ASCII.

KFG

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[mabinogi]

> Being able to apply XSL alone on a document means it incredibly simplifys the process of converting from one format to another WITHOUT having to learn YA proprietary format/tools.

Actually - in most cases except where the XML in question is very simple, I'd say it's esaier to write a custom conversion program based on SAX or even DOM than to battle with XSLT.
The result would definitely be more readable and easier to maintain....
However, you're still pretty much right - you're not forced to use proprietry tools.
You do have to learn a proprietry format though (in either the custom coversion case or the XSLT case) - as the format of the XML document itself may be proprietry, but it's generally much easier to reverse engineer an XML format than a binary one (or even a lot of plain text ones)

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[mabinogi]

Gah! Multiple previews and still the typos win.
It must be Monday.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, and XML can contain base64 which is as dense and unreadable as binary, but good XML will do that... what's it called, oh yes, THAT WHOLE TAGGING THING.

Most XML uses tags, and being XML means you've got a while lot of tools like XSL-FO, Xpath, XSLT, Schemas/RelaxNG, XML Pipelines.

I code publishing cycles for a living (mostly in Apache Cocoon) and the OO.org format, although not as good as something like Docbook or TEI, is so much better than a binary format.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[mr_tenor]

The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.

I would still fear working with binary formats (not that the example I cite is properly documented, but the bits people have figured out give me nightmares).

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Slugbait]

Well written XML, yes. MS Office in XML A89172BC098123...

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Tanktalus]

I have to agree with the GP post ... it's not the format, it's the documentation of the format that matters.

Let's say that OOo were to disappear one day, replaced with another suite from somewhere else. If that new suite also documented its format, it would be simple, if not completely trivial, to write a convert program to convert from OOo to the new suite. Nothing here is fundamentally different just because OOo uses XML.

The only difference between XML and other formats is that with XML you may not need to write a parser. But that's not an incredibly difficult piece to write once. (Writing a generic XML parser is a bit more difficult.) Even if both suites used XML, but used different schema because they look at data completely differently, the difficult part would be the semantic conversion (from layouts based on, say, paragraphs to pages or something).

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[MrBandersnatch]

Because one of the goals of the project is to make the XHTML truly accessable (WAI Level 3) and there are about 100 tables (of financial data) that were all created by using tabs and spaces to align the columns; its been an absolute nightmare requiring a massive amount of hand editing. Worse conversion project Evah!!

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

That project does sound truly heinous, but there's a Perl program called the Demoronizer which can help with those MS-Office -> HTML conversions. Even though it wouldn't help with the formatting issues, it's still a good starting point..

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Artifakt]

XML can be orders of magnetude easier. It always should be. (I don't like to use the word always, but this is a genuine ALWAYS, as in XML should NEVER approach the complexity of Perl or C++). However, coders frequently don't take maximum advantage of XML's simplicity.
Just look at the XML parts of Winamp 5. Colors are specified on a scale running from about +4,000 to -4,000 for each shade, instead of say 24 bit RGB, and including other required settings. Various parts of the skin may get variable names like "Glass Highlight", "Glass Substrate Highlight", "Glass Shadow Highlight", "Glassy Text Area", "Glassy Text Substrate Area" and "Glassy Text Shadow Substrate Highlight Area", all in the same skin, or buttons defined only as the "Hard Button Group" and the "Soft Button Group", with no method except hack in some value and run the program, to figure out which is which. Some skins with 80 colors themes or so include a 150 Kb+ XML file.
These examples come from skins with good, professional graphics, and even well written code in other areas. i.e. some people who are actually coding whole new functions into the Maki code still don't hesitate to write XML like this to accompany it. At this rate, we could use an obfuscated XML contest.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Brandybuck]

which it actually does if you're adding images

Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.

Do this experiment. Create an OpenOffice.org document. Embed an image in the document. Save the document. Rename the sxw file to zip. Open the zip file using your favorite method. Notice that the image is a separate file and not a part of the content.xml file.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[arendjr]

Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.

Sorry mate, your entire post is correct with the exception of the word "Nonsense!".

While it's true the images themselves are saved as seperate files inside the zip archive, their properties (like size and alternative text) are stored inside the content.xml file as SVG properties.

With your experiment, try opening content.xml and search for the svg:width and svg:height properties for instance.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[frisket]

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.
...
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.

Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)

The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...

Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).

You should care that it's XML...

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Trejkaz]

Many would argue that wrapping an encoded binary file with XML tags doesn't make it XML.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[sootman]

The XML-ness of it isn't even as important as its plain-text-ness. Ever 'cat' an MS Word doc?

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Renegrade]

> 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.

I dunno, I always found EA/Commodore IFF files to be easy enough to read. PNGs, being inspired by IFFs, are pretty easy too despite the zlib requirements. They're all happy binary files, too. It's the clear and concise documentation that makes a good standard, not wether it's some fancy new ASCII-SGML-etc-text standard or not.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Brandybuck]

Nonsense again. You said: "XML allows you to use different XML schema's within one document". You imply that the data is being embedded in the XML, but this is simply not true. You are most definitely NOT using the SVG schema within OpenOffice documents. You no more embed SVG data in OpenOffice XML than you embed GIF data in an HTML IMG tag.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[aardvarkjoe]

XML is not a file format. It is a text markup language.

The file format of OOo XML files is gzipped ASCII.

If you're going to nitpick, at least do it right. ASCII isn't a "file format" any more than XML is; it's just a standard for encoding characters.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[kfg]

. . .it's just a standard for encoding. . .

Which, when stored in binary form, happens to be the definition for file format

KFG

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[aardvarkjoe]

Which, when stored in binary form, happens to be the definition for file format

No, it isn't. A "file format" describes "the arrangement of data for storage." ASCII does not do that; an encoding is not the same thing as a format.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[kfg]

Like gzip?

gzip file format definition

KFG

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[aardvarkjoe]

I was talking about ASCII. I am well aware of the fact that there is a gzip file format. That still does not make ASCII a file format.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[kfg]

I was talking about gzip.

KFG

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[ultranova]

Okay... The sample file here appears to be describing morphing a picture of a baby to a picture of grandpa, with 15 frames inbetween (unknown if this includes the original pictures). The dot array is most likely the control points for the morph.

Considering that I've never used Morpheus, and don't even know what it does (or didn't before this), I'd say that XML passes this test of readability hands down :)

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[tepples]

its not like there is any spyware or anything with it

"System Requirements: Windows" itself counts as a dependency on spyware to a lot of Slashdot users.

It looks like a definition of a linked pair of meshes. So how do I convert the mesh into polygons in order to perform the texture mapping that makes up a morph? I'm guessing one would use a Delaunay triangulation of the average of the two meshes to connect the dots; how do you do your Delaunay triangulations?

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Ark42]

"System Requirements: Windows"...

There is an OSX version in the works, and if anybody wants to volunteer to create and donate to me a GTK or QT GUI for the standard C++ backend, there could be a Linux version too.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Decaff]

You can obfuscate XML content just as easily as you do with binary structures, while still having a perfectly valid XML document.

So what?

With XML you have to put work into obfuscating it, and you have the possibility of having a clear and reasonably self-documenting format.

With binary formats its already obfuscated from the start. If I hand someone a binary file, were is the built-in indication of endian-ness, work length, data labelling or structure?

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[arendjr]

I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about here. At the start of every OpenOffice.org content.xml file there's a namespace declaration for SVG and SVG properties are used to store meta-data about images in the document. Even though you don't store the image itself using SVG, you are still using the SVG schema. There's more to SVG than just defining how a vector image looks like, you know.

Now the comparison with GIF is just making yourself look silly as GIF is not defined in XML, there's thus no XML schema for it, let alone that would HTML use it to specify metadata about images.

If you're not convinced, go read the OpenDocument specification and do a search for SVG.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[kernelfoobar]

What about 'zcat'?
was it gzip or zip format?
I think the z* tools are gzip based.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[nodrogluap]

The second feature you are talking about is more specifically XSLT. The T is the transformation part. There are other parts of XSL like XSL Formatting Objects for layout, etc..

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Tanktalus]

I think you're missing some of what I said - I never meant to imply that I would recommend writing the XML parser - only that parsing data is such a small part of a conversion process as to be almost immaterial, as long as that data format is documented. The larger part of the effort is semantic parsing - figuring out all the hierarchy, relationships between files, and figuring out how that applies to the new software's data format.

Validation is almost completely unrequired - it's a nice-to-have, that's it. It's not like (many) humans go in and edit this stuff.

XML itself I'm unsold on (is this not obvious yet?). However, I'm not sold on it being a bad thing, either - more ambivalent than anything. It's way more important that the format is documented than anything else. After all, we can come up with some pretty unreadable XML format, too - with 1 or 2 letter tag names, 1 or 2 letter attribute names, and values for attributes that are completely non-intuitive (think: internal look-up, e.g., fr="c" means that the table cell is 3 columns wide, while fr="b" means that the cell is hidden). But, if all of this is well-documented, even unreadable XML can be semantically parsed and used.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[sootman]

Very funny. Yes, unzip them first. Ever unzip a Word doc? :-)

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Decaff]

The point of XML isnt that its human readable.

Well, that was one of the design considerations. The point being that XML data should be meaningful even if you don't have the software to read it.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[Brandybuck]

Now the comparison with GIF is just making yourself look silly...

Then join the silly club, because it was YOU who implied that all images (and not merely SVG metadata) were stored in the XML. Please go read your original post again. After reading it again myself, in the context of your recent reply, I finally understand where you are coming from. Next time express yourself clearly.

file size

[Morthaur]

Speaking of superior file formats, has anyone else noticed just how much smaller OOo files are than the comparable MS Office documents? I routinely have to export files to MSO formats for peer review, and I have always marvelled at the amount of space a .doc takes by comparison.

Re:file size

[figleaf]

It is a compressed zip file.
Rename it to zip and extract the files.
The extracted files are usually larger or about the size of Word documents.

Re:file size

[imsabbel]

The magic is called "zip".
Open a staroffice document in winzip and you will find the content xml files...

Re:file size

[ssimontis]

Yes, the OOo files are much smaller. Still, we have problems here. First off, using any program-specific file format is a problem. We need a file format that can be read by most text editors. For example, my school uses Microsoft Office. When I bring in a doc from home, if I forget to convert it I end up retyping it. If other programs adapt OOo file formats we won't have a problem. But for now this is a program.

Re:file size

[jejones]

If memory serves--I'm trying to remember where I read this, and it may be obsolete--an MS Word document file is simply a dump of its in-memory representation, so one would expect it to be gratuitously large.

Re:file size

[jimicus]

I can well believe it. Older versions of word had this awkward tendency to crash if a document was corrupt, usually when paginating the point where the corruption occurred.

As anyone who's written in C will tell you, "interesting" things can happen if your program hits something in memory which doesn't match expected values.

Re:file size

[pseudochaotic]

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.

Re:file size

[TheKarateMaster]

If you unzip the file, then find the content.xml, the text is salvageable. (especially if you have a syntax highlighting program)

Just open content.xml in notepad or something, trim out the tags, and you should be good to go. It may be awkward, but if you NEED the file...

Re:file size

[IamTheRealMike]

Pretty much correct, but it's done partly for speed. Word is much, much faster at saving than OO is.

Re:file size

[Finuvir]

We also measure network bandwidth in Mbps and Internet connectivity in kbps.

Re:file size

[NamShubCMX]

KOffice is switching to OASIS.
I am pretty sure AbiWord will follow.

If the 3 major OSS office suites switch, I'm pretty sure the rest will follow too :)

Of course I don't think MS Office will ever import natively OASIS files.

Re:file size

[AnyoneEB]

Getting the text out of a Word document is not that difficult. Open it up in a text editor and most of it will appear to be junk, but if you scroll down you should find the document's text and be able to just copy it out. I suppose there would probably be more junk in the middle of text if there were more formatting changes, but I am not sure on that. (I have not looked at Word documents like this much, but I have been able to fully recover the text of a couple that were recovered from floppies.)

Re:file size

[gnuLNX]

nah.

Re:file size

[berzerke]

...I don't think MS Office will ever import natively OASIS files...

Of course it will. That will make it easier for people to switch from those <sarcasm>inferior</sarcasm> office suites to the great MS "lock'em in" Office something.

Now exporting is another matter altogether. Why should MS make using/switching to a competitor's product easier?

Re:file size

[Methuseus]

is there really a difference between saving in 5 seconds against saving in 15? I honestly have not noticed a diference in time to save in either program as it is, so I may be wrong.

Re:file size

[cammoblammo]

FOSS psychotics are the ones who are focussing on the bigger picture, and they believe a world without Microsoft is a theoretical possibility. It seems pretty narrow minded to assume that everything MS does should be considered a standard that everyone should blindly follow.

There may not be a conspiracy, but if a company holds a near monopoly on office software, there is a huge disincentive to open up the format.

The organisation I work for will never move to OOo because there's no guarantee that all MS Office files will transfer easily. We could go for a hybrid setup, but that's a lot more admin overhead. Having a few MS Office installations also means licensing headaches and so on. It's just easier to stay where we are, and not have any of the hassles associated with changing work tools.

So of course, MS wins, and competitors find entry into the market place difficult.

Besides, I like the guarantee that in fifty years' time I will be able to access the documents I write now. I can't even open documents I wrote 5 years ago (somebody else's copy of MS-Works) without having to buy a new copy of Works and an OS to run it on (I tried---it wouldn't work under WINE.)

Now I don't think that in the event of catastrophe (bankruptcy, Osama hits Seattle, etc) MS would withhold access to data formats. But it is possible, and not that many really worry about what the situation will be in a few decades.

Re:file size

[cammoblammo]

You're mostly right. As far as I remember, you'll find a lot of stuff in there from previous edits. So if you've deleted something, it'll still be there. Some of the junk simply tells Word to ignore the (ir)relevant parts.

I'm not sure though---this may be a 'Fast Save' thing and not normal operation.

Re:file size

[Pyroja]

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.

Re:file size

[Hast]

It used to be that you could even read data from other programs in your Office files. It didn't clean out the memory properly before it was used apparently.

I believe it was Schneier who put up a topic about this were he listed a bunch of stuff he had seen in other peoples office docuemtns. (Stuff like WWW-sites they'd gone to and passwords.)

Re:file size

[Erik Hollensbe]

When people are triggering bugs in Word because of saving files too often - when the trigger happens because you've run out of file descriptors...

15 seconds is a long time.

Re:file size

[mpe]

Speaking of superior file formats, has anyone else noticed just how much smaller OOo files are than the comparable MS Office documents? I routinely have to export files to MSO formats for peer review, and I have always marvelled at the amount of space a .doc takes by comparison.

OOo uses ZIP compression by default. Also MSO is likely to make use of unicode (16 bit) characters even in places where ASCII would be fine.

Re:file size

[Erik Hollensbe]

That worked when word perfect was the big boy, a title it held up until the mid 90's, actually.

Nowadays you'll be happy if OOo is able to export to the most recent Office format.

It's going to take a "killer app" like Word was when the bridge to Windows '95 happened - OOo has to be a little more original than cloning everything MS does and renaming it - sorry.

Re:file size

[mpe]

If memory serves--I'm trying to remember where I read this, and it may be obsolete--an MS Word document file is simply a dump of its in-memory representation, so one would expect it to be gratuitously large.

Which also makes maintaining backwards compatability difficult and means that the document can contain all sorts of unexpected data. (If the program uses "malloc" rather than "calloc" to assign it's space.)

Re:file size

[guet]

Perhaps they save so often because they're worried it'll crash, because the document format is a screwed up binary dump of the program state. : )

There are other ways to speed up saving (break the document up into multiple text files etc) which don't have the horrible consequences of saving freeze-dried OLE objects. Backwards compatability and interoperability become a nightmare, but then perhaps that's by design in Word?

Re:file size

[archen]

If that's true, it sort of makes me wonder just what in the hell MS is doing. The other day I got an excel spreadsheet that was 5.4 Mb. I went through it trying to figure out why it was so large, but in the end just gave up. I tinkered with exporting it in Open Office. Then for the hell of it I resaved it to MS Excel. The size went down to 2.6Mb. Now that really puzzles me because I opened it up in Excel with no problems what-so-ever, I couldn't find anything wrong. So where are they getting the extra junk from? Saving it to native OpenOffice was a nice 640Kb BTW.

Re:file size

[abertoll]

What I've noticed is that with "regular sized" files, the OOo files are smaller, but when you get past a certain page count, Word is smaller. I don't know if this happened to me because of the specific document in question. Has anyone else noticed this? Try saving a document over 500 pages long, 1000 pages long, and see if Word catches up.

Re:file size

[C0deM0nkey]

I care nothing about an open standard for document files as I don't believe there's a conspiracy to hide anything in them.

Neither do most people who preach the "open formats" mantra. What they do believe, however, is that open formats ensure them the ability to move to a different application if the current application no longer meets their needs - without losing data.

Open Formats ~= Open Data. What are you going to do if Microsoft decides to no longer support the file format you are currently using (for whatever reason - could be a legitimate end-of-life type thing)? What if your current copy of the application you are using will not install on that whiz-bang new machine you just bought? Sure, you may be able to keep that old machine around for awhile...but, sooner or later, it is going to fail.

Users who want open formats realize that these situations are inevitable and without an open format they stand to potentially lose a tremendous amount of material and effort. At least if the format is open, they stand a reasonable chance of being able to find a tool that can extract their data and/or pay someone to write such a tool... That is why open standards are important for everyone.

Finally, don't be a fool. In probably the vast majority of cases, application providers who refuse to divulge their data format are trying to get you locked into their application suite. Once you start using their tools, there will be a lot of momentum to keep you using their tools. Closed data formats become a barrier to entry for new providers in established markets; in this way, closed formats are a conspiracy to keep new providers out of the market.

Re:file size

[anonymous22]

I also do this to transport documents to a printer. My OOo docs are on average a whole one-third smaller. The docs are usually text only, I have not tried it with graphics.

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.

Re:Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

An analogy on /. is like a camel with it's head up it's arse.

An apostrophe on /. is like XML in today's software - seldom used in the correct place.

Re:Stability

[DeTHZiT]

Usually when you experience many random crashes, or seemingly random results from a program, there's usually a problem with your system memory (RAM).

Try using Memtest86 to diagnose your system. It may be nothing, bad luck, or some other component of your system misbehaving, but it's usually bad memory.

Re:Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

I use OOo. I wrote my Computer Science Thesis with OOo. I launched OOo writer in February and shut it down in November (on a Gentoo Linux machine). I simply cant believe your crashing problems are related to the OOo software.

Additionally, the formulae functions in OOo are far superior to that of MSO. The ability to export directly to PDF (natively from OOo) as opposed to installing inferior pdf converter plugins in MSO is another reason why OOo is superior.

Finally, Endnote for MSO is about the most unreliable, crash prone program I have ever seen. Again OOo does this natively with their built in Bibliography Database.

Re:Stability

[sirReal.83.]

That's only likely if you're getting the same illogical behavior from every app.

Re:Stability

[mibus]

stability wise, it's no better, and note no worse, in my books than an MS product.

That may be your experience, but it's not not everyone's.

I've found the stability of the latest OOo impossible to question, though I haven't had too much trouble with MSO crashing lately.

MSO is a pain to install. OK so the first part of the installation is OK, but adding service release upgrades and service packs has always brought me pain. I've also had it occasionally decide that despite taking up 200MB+, a component (like Publisher) isn't installed.

OOo, the last time it did crash for me, had a perfectly auto-saved copy of my work, right up until the moment it crashed. (Abiword does something similar, I believe). Word's "Recovered Document" has never properly worked for me...

Re:Stability

[DeTHZiT]

Or it may be that the Windows version of OpenOffice was cobbled together by brain-damaged monkeys.

Possibly, but they're the best damned brain dead monkies that money couldn't buy!

Besides, I doubt that OpenOffice is inherently unstable. I started using it exclusively now, and apart from minor irritations (such as spacing inconsistencies when converting to/from MSOffice), I've never run into any serious issues. I've used it for some very large projects (such as essays that I will leave running in the taskbar for days at a time while I "research"), and I've also used it to take notes (daily).

If I did have any issues with OpenOffice, they woul be with the automatic PDF generation. It's a wonderful tool, and every office app should have it, BUT... Under windows, I use a different program to make PDFs (PDF995 - a free virual "printer" that makes PDFs), and I find it outputs much higher quality PDF's that are SMALLER in size. (For example, when I'm making a Resume, it goes to 30k (pdf995), from 60k (oo.org pdf)) Not that big of a deal, but when emailing resumes, it makes a difference.

However, since this only works in windows, and it's not "open source" (AFAIK), it's not a solution for everyone.

Re:Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't be offended by what I'm about to say -- because my experiences with OO.org differs from what you describe. To imply that many OO crashes are caused by RAM problems is completely inaccurate and misleading. Memtest86 is a fine tool which I often use, but it will solve very few OO problems. I install OO on machines frequently and know for a fact that some Word documents cause OO to crash. It's a repeatable problem, not having to do with physical problems in the machine. Yes RAM can be a problem, but it's NOT the first thing you'd look at.

And believe it or not, saving to .doc format in OO isn't perfect either. Sometimes it creates a corrupt document and Word barfs like it's trying to get rid of some 2 day old pork from a chinese buffet.

OO is still in it's infancy, having been around for a very short period of time. The Word .doc format is old and very poorly documented in comparison. Even the volunteer's from OO.org will tell you that there's at most 90% compatibility, yet I have no doubt that the gap will close greatly in the next few years. So don't get me wrong, I love OSS and highly recommend OO.org. I've even made it a part of my personally-compiled-don't-leave-home-without-it utility CD.

Why do I like OO.o formats?

[Realistic_Dragon]

So for once the unwashed are comming to _me_ saying 'I can't read this'.

If it ever goes away I shall have to switch back to mailing them raw TeX files again.

Re:Why do I like OO.o formats?

[pete-classic]

If you use a TeX file they can still get at the content with a text editor (or even *shudder* Word), but if you send 'em a DVI, they can't read it at all without a DVI viewer, which they almost surely don't have.

Then when they complain you can ask them what there problem is, with an air of superiority. It is, after all, a DeVice Independent file.

-Peter

Formatting Woes

[Thats_Pipe]

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.

Re:Formatting Woes

[figleaf]

You are right non Office products don't always write proper Office compatible documents.
Thats why I just use MS Office.
Atleast I am assured that everybody can read my documents.

Re:Formatting Woes

[rbochan]

...but the point is Office just can't handle anything that wasn't originally created by MS.

So, is that because of incompetence, or by design?
hmm...

Re:Formatting Woes

[LnxAddct]

Its called pdf (portable document format) and OO.o can save to it natively.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Formatting Woes

[Sique]

...but the point is Office just can't handle anything that wasn't originally created by MS.

So, is that because of incompetence, or by design?

It's by design. When MS Word was being pushed by Microsoft as "industry standard" (back in the late '80ies, early '90ies), it came with dozens of import filters for about any word processor format known to Man. So the MS sales person could always point out that no one would loose any old data, because Word was pretty capable of reading the format in question.

With the later versions, the number of file formats MS Word was supporting, shrank. And today it is reduced to old MS Word formats (and none of them as perfect as other office suites) and to a number of good documented formats (RTF, HTML, plain text). I remember when the company I was working for was converting from OS/2 to Windows NT4.0 and the old Ami Pro documents were no longer readable. It was quite an effort to finally find an old copy of Winword 6.0a to import the Ami Pro files, because the later incarnations of MS Word weren't able to read them directly.

Re:Formatting Woes

[veg_all]

(back in the late '80ies, early '90ies)?

OK, it should be "80's and 90's" because "80ies" parses as "eighty-ees." Or maybe try "8-T's and 9-T's."

Re:Formatting Woes

[Sri Lumpa]

"It is "lose" not "loose." I am dedicated to eradicating this grammar mistake one internet user at a time."

I'm afraid it is a battle that you are bound to loose.

Re:Formatting Woes

[jsebrech]

Actually, it should be 80s and 90s because the decades are plural not possessive or a contraction.

Bob's quick guide to the apostrophe

It's always better to explain grammar with visual aids.

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

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[jawtheshark]

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.

Which is quite odd, because a huge number of people still are using Office 97. The bank I work for is 100% Office 97 (on NT4, not kidding), at home I use Office 97. Actually, I strongly dislike anything beyond Office 97. I don't see any reason to upgrade... many people don't. So OpenOffice is probably what I need to install in order to get what I need and don't have to battle with Office XP (or whatever it's called these days)

Also note that many OEM machines don't come with Office. They have Word. All the rest is Works, and Works really is a bad bad suite.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Kenshin]

Absolutely. OO.o desperately NEEDS to find some proper interface designers.

The problem with programmers designing interfaces is that they design them with themselves in mind.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[spike hay]

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.

I agree. OOo is almost completely unusable for me. In my opinion, it tries to be too feature rich and tries to "do" too much for the user. It ends up being just annoying as hell with such features as insane autoformatting that is difficult to completely turn off. It reminds me of Word 97.

That is why I use AbiWord. It is a tiny, non-bloated program of 17.7 megabytes, and fulfills almost anyone's word processing requirements perfectly while leaving everything in the user's control.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[RedWizzard]

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.

Ah, I see your problem. You've been using PowerPoint and it's rotted your brain. Next time, Just Say No.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[horza]

I went over to a friend's house to 'fix' a problem. He was having trouble cutting and pasting a diagram from StarOffice to Word2003. I discovered that all this time he had been using Wordpad and never known he wasn't using Word. I would also use Word97 under Windows if Abiword didn't suffice for most of my needs. I do miss my RiscOS4 with Impressions and Techwriter though. They beat the pants off any of them.

Phillip.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[nathanh]

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.

Really? I actually prefer OpenOffice and I have licenses for all versions of Microsoft Office, so it's not a cost-based decision.

The style handling in OO.org is simply more intelligent than in MSOffice. The Export To PDF feature is so damn handy. The fonts look better in OO.org. The OO.org layout engine actually works; it seems MSOffice has one layout engine for screen and another for printing. MSOffice has frustrating behaviour w.r.t section breaks.

Sure, OO.org has its warts, but I don't think it sucks.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[MmmDee]

My reason to upgrade was the availability of Office 2K3 for nearly free (something like $70 for all of Word/Access/Excel/ InfoPath/Outlook/ Viso/Publisher together) through a corporate-partnership (?) program between my employer and MS. Previously I had gotten my copies of Office at various computer shows cheaply but the vendor eventually quit coming to the shows.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Ogerman]

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.

Ironically, the existance of Open Source import filters for MSO's file formats now guarantees that these documents will be readable forever. There are good argument for OO.org, but this is no longer one of them.

Of course, one exception may be if MS ever manages to popularize their concept of "trusted computing" and document "DRM." But this is not likely to happen any time soon and it will be too late by the time they try.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Effing_T]

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.

IMHO, this is a feature, not a lack of features. OOo forces you to use it the right way. If you refuse to use styles, OOo is really annoying. Once you've understood that you'd better use styles, using becomes great...

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Asic Eng]

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.

It may not even take that long. I had this problem with Excel once - it used to be possible to embedd graphics into your spread sheet. I had created a large sheet, which embedded several graphics, right next to the cells which contained the data for it.

After an upgrade of Office I was quite surprised to find that Excel was now putting all these graphics on seperate pages. I didn't really need the data anymore in this case, so I didn't investigate whether there was a way to handle this. Still I'm glad I don't have a large archive of documents in proprietary formats.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[4of12]

I can't believe that enterprises and governments are willing to store critical archival documents in Microsoft Office format

In my experience, those are the clueless organizations that haven't scaled up properly. What worked fine for a few people in a department all running the same version of Word in 1992 for a total of 2 years doesn't work for hundreds of people in a company running different versions of Word over the past 10 years. Only now, after about a decade, is it beginning to dawn on them that different versions of Word on different versions of Word documents is an issue.

The ones that have done their homework have already bit the bullet and try to use something like SGML for official documents, although I'm sure there's an active business in providing crutches to move from Word to SGML.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[Ogerman]

Don't bet too much on this.

You obviously don't have any clue how many companies are still using old versions of MS Office and have no intention of ever upgrading because it meets their needs just fine. And incidentally, these are the companies that will be first to break from the aging "word processing" paradigm itself as soon as a viable alternative is available. It doesn't make sense to upgrade MSO if it doesn't improve the business. But true innovation will be accepted and this time it will be coming from the Open Source camp, not MS.

Re:Too Bad OO Sucks So Bad

[abertoll]

I don't know what suck so badly about OOo. I never had any problem using it in lieu of MS Office. And in fact, everyone else I deal with uses MS Office, and I seem to be perfectly compatible. Of course it isn't perfectly compatible, but I would say it's more than just good enough.

Anyway, I think the fact that OOo can make PDF and Flash files is pretty nice.

OO in law offices

[ir0b0t]

This is great news. I use OpenOffice in my small town law practice, and I'm so happy to be liberarted from the tyranny of proprietary licensing fees. Lack of compatibility between software packages (office, accounting, case mgmt., etc.) is an even bigger problem for law offices in rural areas, like mine, who want to explore open source but lack support services.

I'm learning --- ever so slowly --- more about Linux and Samba so I can complete the office transformation some day. Its hard to find patient teachers, and tech understanding comes slowly to some of us. Its worth the effort though.

Re:OO in law offices

[ThisNukes4u]

Good luck to you. It is people like you who embody the other half of open source - the end users.

Re:OO in law offices

[Brandybuck]

I'll make sure not to use your small town law practice, because I like my legal documents corrected spelled.

Re:OO in law offices

[Anonymous Coward]

because I like my legal documents corrected spelled.

I can see that. Looks like you're ready for the next step: a grammar checker.

Re:OO in law offices

[Circuitsoft]

Its hard to find patient teachers,
Personally, I love helping people discover the wonders of Linux. Feel free to drop me a line. Just put "Slashdot" in the subject so I can find it easily among my piles of junk. Circuitsoft@gmx.net

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...

[scrote-ma-hote]

If they don't need to edit the file, why not save it as PDF?

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).

Re:The sad thing is...

[ManxStef]

Until someone makes a plugin for MS Office that'll open OpenOffice docs, this is how it'll stay. It might well be an open format, but it the primary market-share application (MS Office, with an IE-like >90% share) cannot open it then I'm afraid it doesn't mean squat. Like the parent says, when you work with the rest of the word you have to play by their "standard", even if it's not open.

What I'd REALLY like to see is a hack to make Microsoft Office open OOo docs. Even if it's a nasty-ass system-hook that watches for MSOffice opening an OOo document, then calls some stripped-down OpenOffice -> MS Word conversion code (gleaned from the OpenOffice codebase) and passes MSOffice a converted Word doc that it can deal with. (Rinse and repeat for the other MS formats, and tweak to add the relevant types such as .sxw into the MSOffice File...Open dialogs.)

Assuming the OO -> MS conversion works better than the MS -> OO conversion, which I'd imagine it should do (?), so that OOo docs appeared to render correctly in Microsoft Office then that'd be fine. As long as there's a nice small easy installer for it and the actual end-user usage is completely transparent then most people won't care (or know) if the process itself is a fudge, as long as the operation doesn't take too long.

I'm sure there's a skilled coder on /. that could make this happen...

Re:The sad thing is...

[gr8_phk]

Unless its critically important, send them the document in OOo format and suggest they need to use OOo to open it - they can then convert it if they want. You've probably been sent stuff in .pdf and had to download the software to open it at some point... Carefully make THEM look like they're incompatible and need to download the tool ;-)

Re:The sad thing is...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Actually they don't. If someone is technically inclined enough to know what a doc and xls file is, they are 15 geek shame seconds away from downloading Acrobat.

...and then they have Acrobat for windows, which is a piece of garbage. Reading PDF files on windows is a painful experience for many. Acrobat reader is slow and clunky. You can scroll bitmaps faster.

That said, I send only PDF files for security reasons. If your company does not require you to clean all outgoing word files, or convert them to PDF, well they are probably going to be burned by it eventually. They probably won't even figure out that is the problem.

Re:The sad thing is...

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Send them an RTF but name it .doc

They won't even know the difference.

Microsoft Word will open it up.

I tested it, and bold and italics still worked. Probably anything RTF supports will work.

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:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[CdBee]

I should have added - I know that Word Viewer exists because Microsoft Word is pricy, and OpenOffice suite is itself free, but the time and connection charges incurred by downloading the full OpenOffice.Org makes it pricy to a significant proportion of the world's dial-up internet users.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[CdBee]

Why would you rate the proprietary PDF format - which isn't supported on all platforms except by third-party viewers - a "proper" one and the free-libre OOo format improper?

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[sploo22]

First of all, the format specification is freely available. Second of all, what do you mean by "third-party viewers"? Do you think PDF support should be integrated into the OS?

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[mkldev]

PDF? Proprietary? Only if you mean Adobe's implementation. There are thousands of tools out there for generating and viewing PDF content in the open source world. Calling PDF proprietary simply because Adobe doesn't provide a viewer for all platforms would be like calling multicast DNS proprietary because at least initially, stock versions of Rendezvous wouldn't compile under Linux.

Based on that same definition, Postscript is proprietary. Oddly enough, Ghostscript is sometimes known to open encapsulated postscript files generated by Adobe Illustrator that Adobe's own Photoshop can't. When the open source software exceeds the quality and reliability of the reference implementation, it can no longer reasonably be described as proprietary, even if the reference implementation happens to be, IMHO.

That said, I would no more recommend people posting PDF or OOo docs than Word docs, for exactly the same reason. You have to download special software to view it. Even if Firefox had a plug-in in the shipping version, most people wouldn't have that version. For that matter, most people don't use Firefox.

The web is a powerful platform for deployment of information precisely because there are a very limited number of standard formats for contents, and a single standard environment for viewing them. It pisses me off to no end when I see a PDF file without an HTML version alongside it. The last thing I want to do is deal with a whole different environment to view content---whether it's Acrobat or a viewer plug-in makes no difference. Ditto for Word, OOo, etc. (As I always say, "Repeat after me: 'HTML is for Viewing, PDF is for Printing'.")

And I hope I -never- have to read something that some clueless peson uploaded in Postscript again. Yes, there's software for every platform, but no, most people don't have it installed, and it's a pain in the ass to distill to PDF just to view something that's usually mostly plain text anyway. And before you ask, yes, sometimes I have been known to just read the Postscript file in vi.

Bottom line, if in doubt, HTML. If HTML won't work because the person posting it is too anal about formatting... HTML anyway, and post a nice, neat, formatted PDF for the three other people in the world who are as anal as they are. ;-)

</rant>

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of open formats.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[jeremyp]

Do you think PDF support should be integrated into the OS?

It already is in my operating system (Mac OSX) - well not the OS but the GUI framework.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[Gamasta]

I know OO takes an age to load on my machine (Duron 700 with loads of RAM and W98). And so does FireFox. Wouldn't such a extension slow the latter even more down?

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[kcb93x]

I also find it such an irony (and PITA) when MS releases whitepapers on THEIR OWN SITE regarding Office, and Windows, in PDF rather than their own .doc format. Some are one, some are the other. Why? I have no friggin clue, but it's really really really annoying.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[tajmorton]

See this for KDE: Cuckooo:

A KDE Part which allows OpenOffice.org to be run in a Konqueror window.

Is that what you're looking for?

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[kesuki]

why oh why are you running a duron 700... even if your motherboard is capped to a 1.1 ghz 100 mhz fsb athlon you can get those as remnant parts pretty cheap if you shop around a bit... looks like about $52 on price watch... on such a legacy machine as that you're probabbly only looking at 15%-20% performance difference between a duron 700 and an athlon 1.1 ghz.. and honestly you can upgrade the whole motherboard and cpu with ram and everything for under $200 to a 2.5 ghz semtron... which is probabbly about 250% faster than a duron 700...
then again you prob don't have a choice, windows wouldn't be happy (although the 1.1 ghz cpu would work no prob) if you upgraded hardware without buying a new software license... ;)
thanks for making me feel better about my slow 2000+ athlon xp ^^; it loads every program pretty good, games with custom addons have started to load a bit slower... but it's still working fine for productivity and internet apps...

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[Prof. Pi]

Bottom line, if in doubt, HTML. If HTML won't work because the person posting it is too anal about formatting...

Caller: "I'd like to ask some questions about the document you sent me. OK, in the second paragraph starting on page 4, which starts with "In case of a system problem..."

You: "In my copy, that paragraph starts with "If you need to reformat the disk..." You need to set your font size to 10, and make sure you have 1-inch margins when you print. Oh, and be sure you use a variable-width font. Because I don't want to be anal about format!

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[handslikesnakes]

Right, because there's no better way to specify the location of something in a document than page numbers.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[srleffler]

The web is a powerful platform for deployment of information precisely because there are a very limited number of standard formats for contents, and a single standard environment for viewing them. It pisses me off to no end when I see a PDF file without an HTML version alongside it. The last thing I want to do is deal with a whole different environment to view content---whether it's Acrobat or a viewer plug-in makes no difference. Ditto for Word, OOo, etc. (As I always say, "Repeat after me: 'HTML is for Viewing, PDF is for Printing'.")

Unfortunately, in the real world people often want to both view and print documents. Anyone posting a static document online that is likely going to be printed by a large fraction of the people who view it, needs to consider PDF rather than HTML as an option.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[wannabgeek]

It pisses me off to no end when I see a PDF file without an HTML version alongside it. The last thing I want to do is deal with a whole different environment to view content---whether it's Acrobat or a viewer plug-in makes no difference.

My learning for the day : HTML does not require _any software_ to view!!

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[maxume]

PII-333. 196MB ram.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[d-man]

My learning for the day : HTML does not require _any software_ to view!!

Neither do PDFs... if you know someone with a printer.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

HTML is fine for posting documents that you plan to host on a web server. It is, however, not a solution for documents you plan to e-mail to someone, especially if it includes graphics. Also, HTML is for markup, and is not suitable for marketing materials or materials that require precise layout.

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[iii_rjm]

Don't you have to use some 'special' software when viewing an html file or do you just hold the media up to your forehead? :)

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[mkldev]

Which is exactly why I said HTML is for viewing , PDF is for printing. I did say that my rant was against people who only posted PDF without accompanying HTML, not against people who post PDFs for printing. Just don't use -only- PDF. :-)

Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[Gamasta]

The point is not what machine I'm using. OO takes say twice as long to load than a single MSOffice app. It doesn't really matter if it's 10s versus 5s or 1s vs .5s -- it's still twice as long. Point is: Why does it take so long? How can this time be reduced?

And I'll buy the provocation of the PC. I live in a 3rd world country where lots of people are starving and many don't have jobs. Can you really close your eyes to that and keep wasting a lot of money in computers? I buy one every 4 years or so. I don't need a lot of computing power anyway.
And I'm in no hurry either. What would I gain from that anyway?

Oh, FYI I can live a full month with $250 (US$). This has been the average I spend including home, food, transportation and all (alone). Better live a month than wasting in computers when you don't have the money to do both.

Who cares if its XML?-XML Grouch.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

XML format

[bullcs]

I have developed software that returns formats of spread sheets and text documents and the format of openoffice/staroffice makes it easy to develope these documents. XML also makes it easy to parse these documents to use them as input.

A non binary filetype has many more perks as well

[licamell]

The main one that most people overlook is the ability to edit a section of a document and only have that section change. With binary files, like MS Word, if someone opens it up and makes one small change, then the whole file gets changed. This difference comes into play when you start considering the ability to diff files, and to use these diffs for applications such as LBFS (low bandwidth file system), or log based file systems. There is a lot of technology out there that could lead to great improvements on network/disk usage if non-binary filetypes are adopted more regularly. Currently you can only use text based files in these systems. Imagine if you could use CVS with binary files (and actually harvest the benefits of using such a system). Just my 2 cents though.

XML Formats rock!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why I love software that saves as XML? You can edit their saved files with a simple text-editor (vim!), and that saved my ass once: I had to do a rather complex layout with the great DTP program Scribus, and (being still in development) some bug made it crash. Luckily Scribus saved the file before/while crashing, so I hadn't lost everything, but everytime I'd open it, Scribus would crash.
Using a proprietary data-format, I'd be lost now. Using an XML-Format, I just open the file in a text-editor, check what happenend since my last (regular) save, copy&pasted the changes step by step to the old file, until it crashed.
Then one step back, analyze the problem, send bug-report to Scribus-developers and be a happy man.

Re:XML Formats rock!

[Trejkaz]

I like it for that too. At one point I was managing my accounts using an OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet, and I had a Perl script which was able to extract the totals from each sheet for easy usage from the terminal. :-)

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:50 years from now

[Tim C]

I really don't think many people (let alone most managers) think or care about how accessible their data will be in 50 years time.

I agree with you, but in 50 years time, I'll be retired or dead. Most people simply don't think about things like that in the time frame of "many years from now".

Re:50 years from now

[bigberk]

It's unfortunate that most IT managers don't realize how closed formats will hinder them in the future.

Maybe these managers don't expect their company to still be around in 50 years. Or just might not care; so much in the business world is about today's work and this quarter's profits. But for government and my own personal work, I want to make sure the documents will last and be readable for as long as possible ("Data longevity" as its called in the article)

Re:50 years from now

[bvankuik]

I have four years worth of project files and never open them. Yes I keep them but that is more because sorting them out takes too much time. Application Architectures and programming languages change and methods and procedures change as well. I an not at all sure that the archive argument is very important.

Re:50 years from now

[metalhed77]

I'll be laughing at you when 50 years from now this still, sadly, isn't true.

Re:50 years from now

[mslinux]

Ever heard of technology??? I remember the theory about the world running out of food too... that never happened either... because of a little thing called technology. You know, more productive, more efficient, etc. Besides all of this, there's enough coal in Virginia to cover the next several hundred years of energy requirments for the East coast.

Re:50 years from now

[Grishnakh]

There's plenty of energy available to replace fossil fuels, if we put our minds to it and develop it. There's good ol' fission, there's solar power, there's fusion if we ever put the effort into figuring it out, there's moon-based solar power, etc.

The problem isn't technology: if we as a race have the desire to develop and deploy the technology, we can overcome any limitations in natural resources we see now. That may mean having to go to other celestial bodies to get some resources, but that's all possible with the right technology.

The problem is people. We're too shortsighted, our governments are too corrupt, and we don't bother to do anything about it. This is a recipe for disaster. Instead of developing and deploying the necessary technologies now, while things are good and we haven't quite hit a resource crunch, we're ignoring the problem, or fighting over the the resources (Iraq War), instead of devoting effort to improving our technology.

Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[DoktorTomoe]

Funnily, I'm currently working on a bunch of projects to incorperate external Data Sources using Perl and OOo "template" files. E.g. it should be possible to write invoices from a database, copy a template, opening it, entering the data (address and billing information) to the right fields within the OOo file and saving it to disk. The user then should be able to review/print/PDF it and send the results to the customer. Modern accounting software already does this automagically, but my approach allows using the powerful OOo WYSIWYG for formular design - for example, any secretary would be able to write a seasons greetings on the template of december in no time.

In another procect, I use a similar technique to visualize raw data given by CSV (e.g. Adsense data). It saves me a bunch of work I'd had to do manually in Excel.

Magic like this would not be able utilizing proprietary file formats. OOo's XML file format has made my life easier. And I love OOo for it :)

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[YrWrstNtmr]

I'm starting to do some testing on something similar with OOo (with a look to replacing MSOffice with OOo for a number of users), but the fact is, that sort of thing is relatively trivial in MSOffice (specifically Excel).

Read from CSV files, Oracle tables (residing on a Linux server), and SQLServer tables, combine into one or more graphs, lists, and charts, user modify if wanted, and one button click output to Powerpoint slides and/or HTML and/or PDF.

Interoperation like this has been a central part of MSOffice for quite a while. A Word MailMerge template can spit out a bunch of 'season's greetings' in no time.

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[DoktorTomoe]

I don't think you understood what I tried to say... The Seasons greetings on invoices was a mere example.

While it is right that MSO has some interoperation features, it might not have the ones I have to use. My Accounting Suite uses Postgres. So great - there seems to be no way to make an invoice with Word or Excel from one single database entry. With OOo, I write my Interoperation features by myself, in any language I am willing to, using any input format I want to.

And try to trigger MSOs interoperation features with a cron job (The first day of any month, print the Finanzamts [german IRS] paperwork).

That are the reasons I like my Linux, and that are the reasons I like open file formats.

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[YrWrstNtmr]

Don't get me wrong. I like OOo and its open formats as well. While I have not tried to interface MSOffice with Postgres (yet), it can retrieve, and output to, pretty much any ODBC compliant db you wish.

As far as triggering some Office task with a cron job, that is an inherent tool within SQLServer, or for a free, 3rd party tool, there is HAL(HandyAccessLauncher). Runs an Access mdb, whenever you want, with whatever commandline or internal commands you choose. Not perfect, but it does work. I use this to spit out a weekly report to Payroll. I'm sure there are other ways to do the same.

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[ozmanjusri]

Interoperation like this has been a central part of MSOffice for quite a while.

Only within some very restrictive limits. Try to create a Word document from within MS Access, for example. Access will only write to .rtf files, probably because of the complexity of the .doc format. Building documents like that would be far simpler with an open XML format.

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[Trejkaz]

Whereas I do hate Office intensely, Office 2003 does support XML spreadsheet files, which are just as easily editable from scripts as OOo's, or perhaps easier since they don't use a zip file.

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[YrWrstNtmr]

I don't know if i'd use the term 'very restrictive limits'.
Yes, .rtf is the default/only automatic output from Access into a formatted, Word-readable, document. But, as .rtf is a pretty universal format, why not use it (if you are stuck with Office formats)? Word open them seamlessly. Instead of outputting from Access, manipulate Word as an object within Access.

As an exercise, try to create a Word or rtf compatible document from the OOo counterpart to MSAccess. Oh wait...

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[ozmanjusri]

As an exercise, try to create a Word or rtf compatible document from the OOo counterpart to MSAccess. Oh wait...

In 1.9.58, Chose File/New/Text Document, View/Data Sources. Select the data tree in explorer view and right click, then select "Edit Data Base File" from the menu. Chose the Table icon, then Create Table in Design View (or use the wizard, if you want) to make an embedded XML table. Make the table and any queries, forms etc you want, then add your data through the form or set up text fields in the document instead. Once you've laid your document out select File/Save to save the doc in a nice friendly OOo XML format, then use Save As, pick your favorite obfuscated file format, ie Word .doc, and save a copy of the file.

Took me way longer to type this in than it did to make the file... Aint XML marvellous?

Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats

[YrWrstNtmr]

Thanks. This helps with my prelim OOo research.

Open document formats vs accepted document formats

[staeiou]

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.

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 .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."

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.

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.

"...nothing more than...:"

[aquarian]

"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).

Re:"...nothing more than...:"

[grcumb]

"... especially compared to a non-human-readable one (MS)"

Don't you mean 'inhuman-readable'? We are talking about Microsoft, after all 8^)

OpenOffice is better

[nukem996]

I honestly find OpenOffice ALOT easier and ALOT more powerful. When ever im on someone elses computer and I have to use M$ Office the most I cannt do a thing. Compatiblity is great, ive never had a problem. Most computers now do not come with M$ office and I always suggest OpenOffice instead of buying M$ Office, and people are always happy. Maybe M$ is superior in a few things but not in things the averge person uses day to day.

Re:OpenOffice is better

[FryGuy1013]

You really must like a lot OOo since it automatically changes ALOT to a lot :)

Re:OpenOffice is better

[FryGuy1013]

Whoops, guess I look like an ass now since I forgot to preview. Should be:

You really must like OOo a lot since it automatically changes ALOT to a lot :)

Re:OpenOffice is better

[dickrichardv8]

You don't look like an ass; you are ANASS.

Re:OpenOffice is better

[Grishnakh]

You sound like either someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, or an MS astroturfer. Then again, a lot of consultants seem to be like this.

Everyone concedes that MS Office has many more features than OO has.

Everyone concedes that MSO has more features, yes, but not better features. Usually, I just hear people complaining about how MS keeps adding more and more features that almost no one uses, while never fixing the fundamental problems that MSO still has.

Try embedded objects, export/import formats, viewing formats, font selection, printer support, history keeping of key-strokes and document changes, recovery functions, etc, etc, etc.

Font selection? Printer support? What do these have to do with any office software product? There are controlled by the underlying OS. If you're working on a Windows system with 1000 TrueType fonts installed, and connected to various printers, you can access these fonts and printers in either MSO or OOo, or any other program for that matter. If you have an issue with printer support on Linux, fine, but that has nothing to do with OOo, which is not a Linux-only program.

Import/export formats? When I look at these in Word XP, all I see is ASCII, RTF, and various old and new Word formats. Can I read from or save to the major competitor's formats (OOo of course)? Nope. How about WordPerfect, which is still heavily used in the legal profession? Nope. But OOo can read and write Word .doc files.

History keeping of keystrokes? I don't know offhand how large the history is for OOo, but it is quite large for Word, and it sure seems to get a lot of people in trouble when they send out their .doc files to the general public. I'll stick with OOo, which I can easily print to PDF with. If I want to keep a long history, I'll just save another file as a backup. Then I can easily use diff to compare them, something that's completely impossible in MSO.

I also work in a Fortune 500 company (actually, probably Fortune 100 or better), and I've never seen a use for any feature in MSO that OOo doesn't already support. What I have seen, OTOH, is terrible performance in MSO: it's all too frequent that I open a .doc, just to have Word freeze. This isn't my personal computer; it's an IT department supported and administered WTS server. If they, the experts, can't get this thing to work properly, then there's something wrong with the product.

Might other word processors adopt the format??

[Qwavel]

I wonder how feasible it would be for other word processors, such as AbiWord, to use this format natively. Or, at least appear to use the format natively.

That is, after all, what happens in other areas: MS owns the market leading, proprietary, format/protocol, and then the others rally around an open alternative.

BTW, I don't think that the XML encoding is important. What matters is that the format is legally open, that it is published with good documentation, and that there is nothing hidden in it to tie people to OOo.

Re:Might other word processors adopt the format??

[jesterzog]

I'm not an office software developer, but I read somewhere that interpreting file formats is a relatively easy part of such applications. A much more difficult part is the adaption of somebody else's document model to your own document model.

This is why, for instance (I think), the AbiWord team weren't able to easily take the OpenOffice Word Document filter and apply it to Abiword ages ago. Much of the reverse engineering for the file format had been done in OpenOffice, but simply translating an MS Word or OpenOffice document model to an AbiWord document model is a lot of work. I'm not sure what stage they're all at now -- probably much further than they were a year or two ago.

Of course, rather than try to translate the model internally, it may be possible to write an external XSL translation between OpenOffice and AbiWord formats. Not being intensely familiar with either format, I wouldn't know how complicated this might be.

Re:Might other word processors adopt the format??

[bigberk]

I wonder how feasible it would be for other word processors, such as AbiWord, to use this format natively

I don't know about adopting it as the native format, but you can reasonably expect to have reliable import/export to OpenOffice's format. Heck, it already exists in Abiword as a plugin. I tried this myself (with the Abiword installed by Slackware 10) and found no problems; Abiword can easily open OpenOffice's documents.

Re:Might other word processors adopt the format??

[JimDabell]

I wonder how feasible it would be for other word processors, such as AbiWord, to use this format natively. Or, at least appear to use the format natively.

The OpenOffice format is being standardised by OASIS and the KOffice developers have decided to use it as the native format in future.

Re:Might other word processors adopt the format??

[rdieter]

I wonder how feasible it would be for other word processors, such as AbiWord, to use this format natively...

koffice anyone?

Re:Might other word processors adopt the format??

[m50d]

KOffice is in the process of switching to it.

opendoc?

[Leonig Mig]

I remember years ago IBM were working on something similar called opendoc or something? billed as an MSoffice killer? what happened to that?

Re:opendoc?

[Lord Satri]

Well, Apple, not IBM. Yes it was supposed to be an MSOffice killer, the idea was *great*, but never really took off. Learn more by yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[Perl-Pusher]

The default format can be changed. I saw it used in a real estate office. I asked them how they liked it, my realtor said once you got used to using something different it wasn't bad. All of their setups had MS file format as the default.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[oo_waratah]

Because pdf is great for presenting an image but not good for presenting an editable document that can be read anywhere.

The persistance of Monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The problem (IMO) with OO.o is that it saves the documents in its own format by default."

The lastest ask you which one you want as the default.

"Some might say that having the .sxw format be the default will help OO.o get into the mainstream. However, this is faulty logic."

Not as faulty as letting a convicted monopoly persist.

Re:The persistance of Monopolies.

[westlake]

Not as faulty as letting a convicted monopoly persist.

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.

Re:OO Templates?

[oo_waratah]

Try http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/

wouldn't that make data recovery harder?

[taxman_10m]

If your open office file is put on a disk and the disk portion with your data on it gets even the slightest bit corropted then doesn't doom any chance of recovering that file? Maybe I just spend too much time recovering files from old floppy disks gone bad that people send me and this isn't much of a problem anymore.

Re:wouldn't that make data recovery harder?

[Spoing]

1. If your open office file is put on a disk and the disk portion with your data on it gets even the slightest bit corropted then doesn't doom any chance of recovering that file? Maybe I just spend too much time recovering files from old floppy disks gone bad that people send me and this isn't much of a problem anymore.

Nope Zip files can be recovered either entirely or in part...depending on the dammage. A minor amount of corruption may not lead to any data loss -- something that isn't true if the original uncompressed data is dammaged by the same amount.

Since the contents of the zip are text files, at worst they could be edited by hand to correct them. I can't think of a more stable document format that doesn't involve having multiple copies of the document.

Re:wouldn't that make data recovery harder?

[dnoyeb]

No, I think the zip files are just enciphered sequentially. But they are not Encrypted. If they were encrypted then that would probably be true depending on the algorithm.

Format is open, but is it used?

[Trogre]

OpenOffice.org pride themselves on having such an open file format that anyone can use, but tell me:

Are there actually any programs other than OpenOffice.org that can read/write in OOo formats?

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[Spoing]

1. OpenOffice.org pride themselves on having such an open file format that anyone can use, but tell me:

   Are there actually any programs other than OpenOffice.org that can read/write in OOo formats?

Right now? Yes. Others are in the works.

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[dmaxwell]

Koffice is in the process of transistioning to the OOo formats. I can hardly wait. I love the framebased workflow of Koffice but have trouble if I want to use those documents outside of koffice.

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[m50d]

Yes, KOffice.

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[crumley]

Gnumeric reads OpenOffice.org files as well.

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[SkjeggApe]

After unzipping the sxw...

vi

emacs

nano

notepad

textpad

etc......

Re:Format is open, but is it used?

[Trogre]

Funny, none of them interpreted my tables, slideshow or floorplans correctly.

Though, as others have pointed out, AbiWord and KOffice can properly read at least some OOo files.

Re:Hate to point out the obvious...

[mrbcs]

I think the real point should have been forcing microsoft to open up the .doc and .xls formats. That would have done more good than anything else that came from the lame doj hearings.

Word is the defacto standard now. Open it up and let other companies make programs to use it. As we speak, office 2003 is incompatible with older versions to once again lock people into microsoft software.. this just sucks.

File format interchange

[4-D4Y]

I favor html to the doc (in any shape or form), but what I do like about OOo is it's file conversions, which are still a little clunky, but they're still usable. I find the following especially useful:

• html->doc: For when I am forced into submitting something in doc format. There'll be a link to the real html document on the first line of the doc, guaranteed :-) Too bad the CSS ins't handled better...
• doc->pdf: Good for making nice clean finished docs, even if they're bloated.

And it's all free.

Re:File format interchange

[bcmm]

It's support of de facto "standards" is definitely a great feature. IIRC, PDF creation in MS Office requires Adobe Acrobat (not the reader, the expensive one for creating PDFs).

Another feature which impressed me was the ability to open presentations made in Powerpoint and save them as swf (Macromedia Flash) files.

The doc->html source is much better than word's. W3C compliant, and human-readable.
But the startup times/memory usage suck on my gentoo machine.
But it is a work in progress, unlike MS office (What changed in Office XP? A less pleasent windows XP style GUI and slower loading, but anything real?).

Re:Stuck in DOC-land.

[oo_waratah]

Which version did you use? There has been a lot of work lately that invalidates your comments. 1.1.5 has just been released.

You web link also does not work!

Open formats are good

[martin-k]

I'm all for open file formats. That's why our own TextMaker 2005 will support OpenDocument (née Oasis) and OOo file formats. Not that developing a filter was much less daunting than developing our Microsoft Word filter... ;-)

Re:Open formats are good

[martin-k]

That's your choice obviously. We are pointing out flaws that we perceive as important in OpenOffice. We try to compete on merits, MS Office is shoved down people's throats...

Many people are telling me that OpenOffice could be faster and less demanding on memory, and these are areas where our own products shine. Have you never wanted OpenOffice to start a little quicker?

My personal feeling is that even open source products are not beyond the realm of criticism in areas where they fall down. Mind you, I am seeing that our little PlanMaker/OpenOffice comparison page is causing the OOo developers to improve their product. So, even if you never use TextMaker or PlanMaker, you profit from our little row.

Apart from that, I am still convinced that open document formats are the way to go if we all (united and apart) want to break Microsoft's monopoly.

Re:Open formats are good

[arendjr]

Hi Martin!

Will TextMaker 2005 support setting OpenDocument to be its default/native file format and when is its release planned?

I happen to write Document Managament Software which has good support for OpenOffice.org Writer documents and which will support OpenDocument as well. However, we also face some of the problems OpenOffice.org currently has to make a full switch to it. Maybe OpenOffice.org 2.0 will solve these soon enough, but otherwise your product might be a real option to consider.

Btw, why weren't OpenOffice.org Writer filters easier to write than MS Word filters? The reason I support OpenOffice.org documents with my software is for a large part because it's so easy. Then again, I don't aim for writing a 100% compatible word processor, but rather an XHTML viewer supporting basic features and indexing the documents for my searching functionality.

Greets,
Arend jr.

Re:Open formats are good

[Cyph]

Martin,

Out of curiousity, do you guys offer any educational discounts? I was working on my research paper the other day and was wishing that I actually bought TextMaker when you guys had that $11.11 sale going. I can't really afford the suite at $70.

Re:Open formats are good

[martin-k]

Yes, when we finally complete our educational web site. Have a look at the German educational site to see what pricing you can expect - site licenses at 12 Euros...

Re:Open formats are good

[martin-k]

When everything is complete, we intend to make OpenDocument one of the default formats. Right now, we are still grappling with some issues in SVG import, so we still have some work to do.

The problem was with OOo file format documentation. It's huge but neither complete nor correct. The Oasis documentation was much better. We were backporting information from the Oasis docs to our OpenOffice filters.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants other people mucking about with your files anyway?
Are you serious? Just to give you two very common examples (since this is what I need to do frequently):

Studying: Group assignments on courses
Working: I run a small consulting/custom software development business - we have had cases where clients want to change some terms in our default contract, in those cases we send it as a .doc (because that's what they want) and visit them for a meeting in which we decide what the final terms should be and modify the original document on site since that saves a lot of time compared to taking notes in the meeting, making changes and then sending it again (and one iteration of that might not be enough). Even though I've had good experiences with OO.org's .doc export capability it once turned into an awful mess - bullet points and indenting was impossible to get right even though the document, which was created with OO.org, looked fine when it was first opened in MSOffice.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[aldoman]

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.

Important for government work as well.

[jbn-o]

For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments explains how important not being locked in is to doing transparent government work in addition to treating citizens well. I'm sure he's not the only one, but his letter to Microsoft is well worth reading.

Yes, open formats are required.

[mowler2]

I recently worked as a consultant for a biotech company. They where developing health care drugs for the American market, and one of all FDA regulations they had to follow, was that all documents regarding some substance or drug must be available for at least 10 years time, or more.

This was a big reason they did NOT adopt open office, because in their corporate world (that is the opposite of real life) Microsoft Office was the guarantee that their documents would be accessible in 10 years, or more. I disagreed and did some arguing with them for the importance of open formats, but in the end they choosed Microsoft Office. Because; In the corporate world, Microsoft is king.

I believe they made the wrong choice and (IMO) the correct way of following FDA regulations, etc, is to use open formats for data/documents/etc. However this has not yet been realized by the industry (or FDA, I believe).

However, when the industry DO realize, all open formats will be at a very nice spot compared to Microsoft Office/closed document formats.

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[The Cisco Kid]

Whoever at the FDA chose to use MS Word with the goal of guaranteeing availability of the documents in the future must have been testing too many drugs firsthand. Ten years from now, they will be lucky if they can find a version of MS Word that can open the files they are saving today, and I hope when that day comes they are faced with the tough choice of either paying $megabucks in fines, or paying $megabucks to MS to provide them a way to access the data.

For something like this *PLAIN ASCII TEXT* would have been the way to go. Machines 30 years old can read that, and machines 30 years from now should still be able to as well.

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[westlake]

in their corporate world (that is the opposite of real life)

The corporate world is real life to those who must live within it. If you approach your clients as the arrrogant outsider who thinks he has all the right answers, you are going to meet resistance.

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[mowler2]

I don't think FDA recommends Microsoft Office or any other specific software in this case, but in my experience, companies seem to read "Microsoft Office" wherever it says "documents must be available for a long period of time".

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[mowler2]

Yes, you are right, one cannot approach clients arrogantly. However, I quite often do find the corporate world to be a quite different compared to the "normal" (in my POV) "geek" world. :) (even if I dont say that to my clients)

Just the very common misconception that "more expensive" == "better" ( => free (as in beer) software must be horribly bad, etc), is quite different from my philosophy. ..I guess I just have to get used to it. :)

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[dmaxwell]

Nonetheless, the 8-bit character encodings are well documented. Creating a filter for them on a machine that would have to be the equivalent of a quad-processor 20Ghz P-IV should be fairly trivial. Trivial will probably not be a good word for trying to read a MSO document created today.

Re:Yes, open formats are required.

[Grishnakh]

Just the very common misconception that "more expensive" == "better" ( => free (as in beer) software must be horribly bad, etc), is quite different from my philosophy. ..I guess I just have to get used to it. :)

Or, you could offer them a very expensive alternative which is far superior to both "free" software, and Microsoft software: offer to sell them software from me. My office software, "Grishnakh Office", is much better than anything else out there, including its low-priced cousin, OpenOffice.org. Why is it better? Well, the most obvious way is its price: $10,000 per seat! It also has very important features, such as a splash screen that says "Grishnakh Office". But, for any big corporation that orders within the next 30 days, I'm offering a big discount: $8,000 per seat! When you're talking with other CEOs on the golf course, you can brag about how much you paid for Grishnakh Office, and how it's obviously the best office software available, and since they were too slow, they'll have to pay the full $10,000 per seat license fee.

BTW, I only take cash.

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[emarkp]

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.

So you neglected to show them how to (trivially) export to PDF?

I fail to see why a program defaulting to its native format is a problem. Our office is switching over to OO quite successfully and we're thrilled to be free of MS format.

And yes, if you wanted to save as .doc (in Writer) you can set that as the default.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[drinkypoo]

I upgraded past Office 97 because it didn't properly support multiple monitors. If you had the application on the second display, the pull-down menus and such would still open on the first one. Their hotspots, however, remained on the second.

Re:OO in law offices - Off Topic

[HoldenCaulfield]

I find it interesting how you state that you're working in a "small town law practice." I'm assuming the link to Smith Jewell is because that's where you work.

Having relocated from Cincinnati, OH to Helena, MT at the end of July, I have a hard time accepting that Missoula is a small town. Still, it's definitely nice to see a fellow Montanan on /.

patent xml for Wordprocessing

[oo_waratah]

They can patent new ideas. They cannot patent blatantly obvious ones. The format of OOo was xml before Word released their layout.

Word may introduce 'new' technology in XML format an patent that however. This is how the market percieves control is gained. Corporate reponsability will eventually become important as well, the world of software development is changing.

Re:patent xml for Wordprocessing

[ScrewMaster]

Of course they can patent blatantly obvious ones. You forget how carefully the USPTO researches each and every application to make sure that the patent claims are both non-obvious and not covered by existing prior art.

Re:patent xml for Wordprocessing

[Kent Recal]

Somebody really needs to pull the plug on this whole patent crap.
I mean, COME ON !

Re:patent xml for Wordprocessing

[ScrewMaster]

That really means Congress, and I don't see them doing anything about it, given the amount of money certain members of that august body make by selling their influence. It's just not something of which the average voter is even aware, much less willing to make into an election issue (even though he or she certainly should.) I really don't see any resolution coming until the damage to the U.S. economy becomes so readily apparent that it does become a serious political hot potato. Even then, there will be a lot of posturing, a lot of "I promise to eliminate the patent problem" and nothing will change anyway. Too much high-powered corporate interference at the Federal level, I'm afraid. That, ultimately, is the issue that absolutely has to get resolved, and it may take a few high profile arrests for treason and malfeasance in office before anything useful happens.

Now that I think about it, what will probably have to happen is that the courts will just get so clogged with bogus patent claims that judges start rejecting them out of hand. I mean, fraudulent or nuisance cases are really not supposed to make it to court: a patent on "a method for clicking a pointing device" shouldn't ever see the light of a courtroom. But .. is it reasonable to expect the judiciary to do the Patent Office's job? A judge is not a patent examiner. On the other hand, a judge probably wouldn't do any worse than the USPTO is doing anyway.

Is this newsworthy?

[Beetle B.]

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).

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[sik0fewl]

I mean, really. The article is very terse, and says nothing that hasn't been beaten to death on Slashdot every month or so.

Well, it must be that time of the month again.

--
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Gandhi

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Beetle B.]

Good luck in your goal.

My point is that we've had very detailed reviews of Open Office in the past. Just not too long ago (less than a month?), Slashdot had a story on comparisons between the various Office suites, with Open Office being the winner.

This article added nothing to that one, and the comparison article was far more detailed, and much more likely to convince someone.

(Now if I could only find that article and post the link here...)

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[Crispin Cowan]

I'm curious why people have bothered to upgrade MS Office past 97 or 2000 at all.

Good question. I am still running Office 97 (on VMware on my Linux laptop) and until very recently I had no motive at all to upgrade. The new motive: OpenOffice.

"WtF?!" you might ask :) A collegue tried switching to OpenOffice. We got into swapping a PowerPoint document back and forth, and at some point I started getting .ppt files that PowerPoint97 could not open, claiming that the file had been created by a future version of PowerPoint. So something is broken in OpenOffice's "export to PowerPoint" that is emitting files that PowerPoint97 cannot read.

Oh, the irony. Forced to upgrade to Office 2003 because someone in my organization tried OpenOffice :(

Crispin

Integration is the holy grail

[pfunkmallone]

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.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[aldoman]

What? Why? It's very easy to reverse engineer it. I could do a good bit of it myself.

If there is already a Macro language that works in a very similar way it would not take much effort to fill in the gaps and change the syntax so it's VBA compatible.

Mindblowing Essay that disagrees with your point

[xtermin8]

Don't Read This!

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[bigbigbison]

I don't really care if people want me to muck about with their files or not, but the first thing I usually do with a pdf of something I find usefull is convert it to text. If all documents that were just plain text would be posted online in .rtf I would be happy.

The worst feature in OOo

[jjga]

Try and create a table inside a slide in Impress... Some as apparently simple is really tricky.

However, being fair, other features of OOo are clearly superior than those in MS Office, like the equations editor.

Re:The worst feature in OOo

[dont_think_twice]

However, being fair, other features of OOo are clearly superior than those in MS Office, like the equations editor.

True, but why did OOo invent a new equation format? Why couldn't they have just used the latex format? It is a great format, and would have made compability with latex documents very simple. Instead, they created a new format which isn't any better, and further fragmented the word processing market.

Easy fix

[bergwitz]

There's an easy fix for this problem. Add a button for Save as Word*. Even stupid/lazy users can handle that.

*Use this macro collection For buttons, create your own from one of the buttons in /openoffice/share/config/symbol.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[SirTalon42]

"So something is broken in OpenOffice's "export to PowerPoint" that is emitting files that PowerPoint97 cannot read."

I'm figuring he was using something in Impress that PP97 doesn't support.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[Crispin Cowan]

I figured that too :) The interesting point is that the inclusion of this feature not supported by PowerPoint97 resulted in, effectively, a hard to erradicate virus running around our office that motivates people to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003.

Crispin

open format != popular format

[Corson]

The format I would like OOo to manipulate efficiently is the format most text documents use, that is, .doc. 95% of the world uses that format. Headhunters systematically reject my resume in PDF format, they want it in .doc format only. Companies use .doc format. Universities use .doc format. Government use .doc format. That's real life.

Re:open format != popular format

[The MESMERIC]

script the .doc with a macro virus.
that'll show them.

Re:open format != popular format

[J. Random Luser]

Most text documents use .txt. Formatted text is unfortunately mostly in .doc nowadays. Our University tried at one stage to use .rtf, but flagged it away after MS scrambled it too often so different versions of Word couldn't read each others' "interchange format" documents...

Good points but

[xenocide2]

they fail to offset the "network effect", the positive utility gained from people standardizing on MSO. Don't get me wrong; I really wish I could use OO.org but the truth is that Word doesn't read my doucments and OO.org fails to export my Resume correctly. As much as I enjoy giving company reps a PDF, more and more places want a .doc format so they can quickly reject your resume for not having keyword X on it.

I need a job; promoting an open culture comes 2nd to this. And we both know Microsoft isn't about to play nice and accept OOo's formats. So even if you do accept that the changing formats and poor intercompatibility of MS software is worth changing for, how do you plan a transition that doesn't screw the company eight ways from Sunday?

Re:What features are missing? Did you ever use OO

[MrZeebo]

Plese give us a list of critical functionality that MS suite has that OO does not. And please leave dotnet off the list.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft Office doesn't do anything related to .NET. The .NET framework is, after all, just a large development library of classes and a new runtime system for Windows. Useful and valuable, as well... at least to those of us who write non-trivial systems.

But I've got one thing MS-Office does that is not (yet) matched by OO.org -- Visio. I used nothing but OpenOffice.org until I discovered that Visio could make my life much easier than it was. OO.org has no true equivalent. Dia is the closest thing, but that isn't actually a part of OO.org, and is not as good as Visio (when you get into complex diagramming needs). And Visio integrates quite nicely with the rest of the MS-Office components. Not that it's without its faults (i.e., importing a Visio diagram into Word sometimes messes up the rendering of the diagram, so you have to export the diagram into a graphic format).

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[The Cisco Kid]

Which means this makes them realize that instead of simply assuming everyone has the same software as they do, they might actually take a moment to think and save what they want to print in something suitable.

Personally, I'd take postscript.

OT: Apostrophes

[scrote-ma-hote]

OK, after two sarcastic comments from AC's, I've fixed the apostrophe problem now. Who knew there were grammar nazis on slashdot. :P

Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we

[sirReal.83.]

SXWs are zipped XML files.

zdiff (1) - compare compressed files

If that won't work out-of-the-box, it could be made to easily.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[sirReal.83.]

A file format can't do both? :\

PDF = Poorly Designed Format?

I'll start

[Dink Paisy]

Correct formating of tables for imported Word documents. Some people insist on using Word as a database (I know, doesn't make sense to me either). OO.o makes it even harder to deal successfully with these people.

Don't lose graphics in imported Word documents.

When you export Word documents, they need to have file sizes that are similar to what they would have if you saved them with Word. I can't email someone back a document that has had a huge increase in file size. Word is bad enough with file sizes, but OO.o is much, much worse.

Don't crash so much. That's just annoying.

A grammar checker would be nice. Word and Wordperfect have had this for over a decade.

Faster load times would be great. Word loads in about one second on my computer; there is no excuse for OO.o taking more than ten seconds.

This is just a minor nit, but still... I use a text editor to edit text documents. OO.o shouldn't claim that its formatted word processor document is a text document.

The dialog box that asks if you are sure you want to export to a non-native file format because you might lose information should tell you what information you might lose. When I import a document, add a few sentences, then save it, I should not be seeing this nonsensical warning. In fairness, Word has this problem as well for some older formats, although not for Word 97 or later formats.

My most annoying point to me(since this one means I can't even use OO.o for documents that I distribute in pdf form only): support for using custom styles for section numbering.

Fix the last one of those and I will use OO.o again. Fix most of them and I will give it another try for regular use. Right now, though, OO.o is as useful to me as Wordperfect for the Atari ST is.

Re:I'll start

[mjtg]

Faster load times would be great. Word loads in about one second on my computer; there is no excuse for OO.o taking more than ten seconds.

MS Office loads as fast as it does because its dll's are loaded into memory at boot time. The trade-off is a slower boot (but people don't notice, because Windows takes a minute or so to boot anyway; an extra 10 seconds makes little difference). Also, you're loading a program into memory that you might not use (although RAM is relatively cheap these days, so again its not such a big deal).

Does anyone know if OOo has this load-dlls-at-boot option ? (I know Mozilla does).

Anyway, if you want a product that sings, dances, and makes coffee for you, then spend the $$$ and buy MS Office. If you want something that is Good Enough(TM) for your word processing requirements, then use OOo for free.

Or, to make an analogy, if you want a Rolls Royce, then expect to pay for it; if you don't need all the features of a Rolls, then a Ford/Chevy/Toyota/whatever should do. (The trouble is, Microsoft's Rolls Royce runs on proprietary roads.)

I do a fair bit of word processing, but nothing more complex than paragraph styles, tables, list indents, ToC's, etc., and OOo is fine for me.

Re:I'll start

[Dink Paisy]

Are you sure that Word loads dll's at boot time? IE does, because it's largely the same program as Windows Explorer. I can't think of any reason why Word would do so. On the other hand, I run Outlook most of the time, which likely does share many libraries with Word, so I'll grant that Word does have an unfair advantage with respect to load times in my particular case.

On the other hand, I don't accept your claim that OO.o is Good Enough(TM). It isn't good enough for me (see the previous post for reasons why it isn't good enough), and anecdotal evidence suggests that it isn't good enough for many other people who have to do spend significant amounts of time in front of a word processor.

Re:I'll start

[Ogerman]

Are you sure that Word loads dll's at boot time? IE does, because it's largely the same program as Windows Explorer. I can't think of any reason why Word would do so.

In Windows, OO.org has a lot of its own "custom" libraries that it loads at startup instead of using the "standard" proprietary Windows libraries. This is the biggest factor in why it takes so long to load. Remember that, unlike MSO, OO.org is multi-platform.

That being said, there is a lot of room for improvement. OO.org load time is improving as its custom libraries are replaced by cleaner, tighter, and "standardized" multi-platform libraries. Compare the earlier days of Mozilla to Firefox today.

Lets make another comparison: If OO.org was ported to use strictly KDE or Gnome libraries, it would load rather quickly if those environments were already in memory.

Re:I'll start

[b0bby]

When you install Office, it puts a link called MS Office Fast Start or something in the Startup folder, which I always remove. So it's not as tightly integrated as IE, but by default it does load something.

Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we

[cloudless.net]

In MS Word, you can select "Fast Save" mode from the options, and it will do incremental saves.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[Trejkaz]

PDF can be edited too... but it's a common misconception that it can't.

Dedicated conversion server

[JavaTHut]

Can't one just have one server with Microsoft Office install, dedicated to accepting requests from OO clients with .doc files which opens it, converts it to something more usable, sends it back and goes on to the next person's conversion request?

... OOo will never have broad appeal ...

[ninjagin]

Jem just needs to face the fact that MS rules the generic office productivity product space and it will never be unseated. One of the keys to the castle is that there is very little innovation left in office productivity software. It's already been done and redone and refined and distilled and the weakest entrants are all dead. OpenOffice is dead, too, and that's why Sun let it go ... there was nothing to improve and no new feature being asked of an office productivity suite. MSOffice is so feature-crowded precisely because MS packed every feature that people asked for into the suite. In true Borg fashion, they also bought a ton of companies that had those features and added their distinctiveness to the collective feature set. When I scan the covers of the computer/software mags, there're no headlines like:

• "MS Adds a Slew of Brilliant New MS Excel Spreadsheet Features!"
• "Check Out the 50 Hottest New Improvements in the All-New MS Powerpoint!"
• "The New MS Word Has the 100 Crucial Advancements that Will Amaze Your Friends and Impress Your Boss!"
• "Why I Finally Switched to MSOffice: A CIO's Tale"

Why is that? ... it's because the product space has been boiled down to just one suite of apps -- MSOffice.

In the very beginning of my tech life, before DOS made it into my life (early 80s), I used WordStar on CP/M. Then I dabbled with apple and used BankStreetWriter, then I found DOS and used WordPerfect, and finally I landed in MSOffice. There's no reason to move out of MSOffice. It does everything I need along with a metric TON of stuff I don't need, and what's more everyone else in the world uses it, too. If they don't have it, they can find it at the local school, university/public library or kinkos or wherever.

What continues to dazzle me (and I'm guessing that Jem probably shares this observation) is that MS keeps making people pay innovation prices for what's really become a static, mature product. By all rights, you should be able to pick up the MSOffice Suite for 15 bucks in the CompUSA/BestBuy/Costco/SAMSclub bargain bin. Yet people still pay the premium because it's one suite of software you absolutely must have to work with all the other people in the world.

Anecdote: A buddy of mine "went Mac" after years of PC-style living. He got tired of dealing with Windows, mostly. I'd suggested OOo for the longest time to him as a way to cut into the cost of operating, but it didn't pass muster. The apps were still not that polished (still are) and the file formats were a problem (still a problem) and interoperability with the MS-world was sub-par (still is). What finally got him to "go Mac"? MS ported their office suite (just the few parts of it he needed) to MacOS. Kind of ironic, isn't it? It's proof, though, that even the anti-MS crowd is forced to kneel at the feet of MS. That's total dominance, and also the reason why MS shares now offer a nice little dividend.

Can we hope that MS will open up their document formats to the world and let true interoperability ensue? Yeah. There's always hope.

Oh, and the bit at the end:

... software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?

Microsoft will never die. It can't. Too many enterprises and governments have bought into it. Can it become less popular --> used less often? Perhaps, but the company will always be there to sell the same old products to you year after year after year. No worries.

Re:... OOo will never have broad appeal ...

[Ogerman]

Jem just needs to face the fact that MS rules the generic office productivity product space and it will never be unseated. One of the keys to the castle is that there is very little innovation left in office productivity software.

You're exactly right. In fact, I would go further to say that office productivity software as defined as "word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations" is a very outdated paradigm in the modern, web-enabled world of IT. Office workers should not be "creating documents." Instead, they should be creating content via a web-enabled interface that may be stored in a database and automatically transformed into any form necessary on the server side.

The way to replace MSO is not to make OO.org into a perfect clone. That will take too long and won't actually innovate. (ie. why upgrade? what we have works.) What we need are quality web-based *true* content management systems. (ie. not blog or web-design software) Likewise, we need a new generation of flexible database software that makes spreadsheets (aka. poor man's databases) entirely obsolete. Today's presentation software is inherently flawed anyhow, so there are dozens of replacements ideas in this arena.

OO.org is a transition tool. It's not a long term solution.

OOo to MS Office

[Money for Nothin']

Does MS Office read .sxw files? No?

Then OOo's own file format is worthless. Customers don't give a crap about your open, XML file format; customers care about whether they get their Word/Excel/PPT files to work, the first time, every time.

Try sending an OOo-generated, non-Office-compatible file to the next person asking for your resume. See how long it takes them to say "I need it in Word or .txt format please" if they're nice, or delete the resume and ignore you entirely if they're not so nice.

Face it, the MS Office file formats still rule the world, like it or not.

Re:OOo to MS Office

[Vario]

Your assumption is only true for some environments. A lot of people I know would not open any word document, either because the don't have MS Office or because they don't want any possible viruses on their system. The science community does use other things than MS Office, Banks and other security sensitive people would rather get something in .pdf than in .doc

So you would get the reply: "PDF or plaintext, please"

Re:OOo to MS Office

[Ogerman]

Does MS Office read .sxw files? No?

A useful feature of OO.org would be the ability to automatically save to multiple file formats. You could have a "word versions" directory for all the stuff you need to email to MSO users.

It doesn't matter so much that most people will still use MSO file formats for now. People who switch to OO.org have an open format for their own internal usage. The real key is finding ways to make the XML-based OO.org formats a killer feature and not just a philosophical nicety. Right now, the OO.org formats add no value in and of themselves. However, open formats are much easier to support in other software. This lends itself to automated document generation, searching, and modification tools. (Think of how many HTML authoring and management tools there are!)

Let me give you a quick example: how easily can you extract all the images from thousands of Word docs? Or how about a tool that does search and replace of a certain text string or image on those files? (say, you're company changed it's name and logo..)

Also, don't forget that the other major Open Source office suite, KOffice is moving to the OO.org (OASIS) file formats. I personally think KOffice has the potential to surpass OO.org because it is a fresh start and not a cleanup effort. (StarOffice was an awful piece of code)

Re:OOo to MS Office

[NewOrleansNed]

Well, it would make more sense if OO.org actually saved files to the .doc format properly. I've written resumes and saved them to .pdf properly, but when I saved them to .doc, they had all kinds of wierd spacing errors. They also have wierd bullet point fonts that don't work outside of OO.org. I think people need to understand that, in some instances, you are not going to push an open (or open source) format on them no matter how hard you try. Microsoft Word documents are one of these formats that will remain the gold standard because it just plain works.

Re:OOo to MS Office

[Ogerman]

Microsoft Word documents are one of these formats that will remain the gold standard because it just plain works.

Except that it doesn't "just plain work." It's a major hindrance to future innovation. As soon as modern web-enabled software that actually improves office productivity starts to take hold, that "gold standard" is going to disappear very quickly. What I'm talking about here is the fact that "word processing" itself is obsolete. Mark my words: in 10 years, the only people still using "word processors" will be casual home users who don't benefit from web-enabled enterprise CMS technology. (and even then, it'll all be Open Source, so many will use the same technology they have at work in a scaled down fashion..)

Re:OOo to MS Office

[NewOrleansNed]

You're jumping to some pretty silly conclusions. First, you claim that an open source solution is going to pop out of thin air and replace the software that Microsoft already delivers with every one of their desktops as a part of Windows. And before you start, Firefox is not an adequate counterexample, because it works with the exact same documents and document formats that Explorer does. I can give you many reasons why it won't work the way you want it to. The main one is this: most desktops are Windows based, most of them contain Word or Wordpad, and most people learn to edit documents with these tools. They are used, they are accepted, and within the context of purchasing additional software above and beyond the PC and OS that comes with it, they are free. Students don't have a reason to switch to a web-based CMS because it's overkill, and they certainly won't do it for the sake of supporting open source software. And when they get into the real world? They'll STILL be using Word based formats, because it will continue to do what they need it to do. Microsoft's 96 format isn't the same as their 2004 format. They change with the times, and if CMS systems become all the rage, they will change with the times and continue to own the market.

Re:OOo to MS Office

[Ogerman]

First, you claim that an open source solution is going to pop out of thin air and replace the software that Microsoft already delivers with every one of their desktops as a part of Windows.

Hardly thin air. The relevant technologies have been available for years and are now very mature in the Java arena. It is integrating them in a manner that is user friendly which hasn't happened yet. And incidentally, Word does not come pre-installed on every Windows desktop. No, Wordpad doesn't count.

I can give you many reasons why it won't work the way you want it to. The main one is this: most desktops are Windows based, most of them contain Word or Wordpad, and most people learn to edit documents with these tools.

Word is a purchasing decision at $150-200/copy of Office depending on bulk licensing. Wordpad is of no value whatsoever. You've obviously never been a sysadmin in a real-world medium/large organization have you? And let me give you one very real reason why what I'm talking about will happen: corporate america is discovering that it costs a heck of a lot of time, money and lost productivity to maintain heavyweight desktop machines that each contain hundreds of points of failure. And worse, they're very hard to secure. The future is a hybrid of thin client technology and today's desktops. All mission critical software will reside on the server where it is easily maintained. Users will have more appliation software than ever before, thanks to Open Source, but will have much less administrative control over their "own" machine, therefore reducing the PEBKAC factor significantly. Upgrades will be rolled out with virtually zero effort and go into effect immediately.

And by the way, users won't need to "learn how to edit documents" with CMS based technology so that's a moot point. They will create content and the final documents will be generated close to automatically.

They are used, they are accepted, and within the context of purchasing additional software above and beyond the PC and OS that comes with it, they are free.

You obviously don't have any knowledge of the theoretical and real-world TCO of today's office suites. Don't think like a home end user.

Students don't have a reason to switch to a web-based CMS because it's overkill, and they certainly won't do it for the sake of supporting open source software.

You're thinking way too narrow. Students won't have CMS software but their universities will. Kids won't have CMS software, but the application server in their parents basements will allow every computer terminal in the house to access the same software.

They'll STILL be using Word based formats, because it will continue to do what they need it to do.

And what exactly do they need it to do that can't be done better via web-based technologies? One of the biggest fundamental flaw in "word processing" software is that users should not be doing their own typesetting. This is more significant in a business environment where there are stricter regulations on document formatting. Another huge flaw is document revision management. There is no easy way to integrate Word into your document production workflow.

They change with the times, and if CMS systems become all the rage, they will change with the times and continue to own the market.

CMS systems are a whole new field with many players and no entrenched standard. (other than XML perhaps!) Microsoft's monopoly works solely on the principle of vendor lock-in via secret API's and document formats. But they have no leverage in this open-standards based market and they can't afford to quickly throw away their Office cash cow in the process. Also remember that no need for Office will quickly mean no need for Windows. This is the beginning of the end of Windows' dominance. It's also the beginning of the possibility for paperless offices when combined with high-dpi display technologies. As I said, mark my words and watch the next 10 years. The tech field is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Spreadsheet collisions and merging...

[barries]

We had an incident where two of us modified the same OOo spreadsheet and tried to check it in to the repository (p4).

This being XML, I unzipped the two versions of the spreadsheet, ran xmllint --format on the contents file of each, did a diff, manually copied the relevant changes from one to the other and tweaked a few of the attributes that they use for run length encoding runs of cells, then re-zipped them. Not quite automatic, but pretty close!

I can't imagine how I'd have done that with Excel.

By the same token, I dare not use OOo on real Excel spreadsheets or word docs. Some of my clients and peer vendors use formatting that either renders like Mondrian spreadsheets in OOo or, when edited with OOo, causes OOo to emit .xls or .doc files that give MSOffice fits.

But we use OOo whenever possible, and it's been getting better compatibility wise with every release.

- Barrie

Re:Can I open a .SXW in MS Word yet?

[10scjed]

grab me the word source tarball and ill write you an extension... oh, wait.

Batch conversion tools are desperately needed

[tweedlebait]

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.

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 .DOC email attachments, despite good efforts to educate.

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.

Actually the point is both

[hagbard5235]

Actually, the point is that XML is both human and machine readable. If all you cared about is machine readable structured data then why didn't ASN.1 and all of it's ultra efficient encoding schemes take off? I would maintain it was because they were human opaque.

With XML, I can machine parse it easily, but I can also sit down and interact with it as a human if I have to. This is a huge leap forward (at least from my perspective).

Re:Actually the point is both

[tepples]

I seem to have read somewhere that ASN.1 and XML have a well-defined mapping one to the other. If you want to work with ASN.1 in a text editor, then convert it to XML, do something with it, and convert it back.

It wont be a standard until MS Word supports it

[Billly Gates]

Companies love to have monopolies because they can set the rules.

Competitor coming in? Then just not read their files and they die off.

You can already do this with zope.

[killjoe]

Zope has a product for this. You upload an open office document and it converts to HTML so you can view it in our browser. You can edit it using OO too.

I hate Open Office

[vspazv]

As a person forced to maintain 50 win2k and 10 NT 4 computers with open office on them I feel forced to point out its bad points.

1. To function properly it must be installed as administrator then have a repair run when logged in as the user to function properly.
2. Under NT4 it will randomly crash when used with a screen depth of over 256 colors.
3. It randomly drops file associations.
4. The horrible resouce hog known as soffice.exe that can use anywhere upto 50MB of ram running in the background at boot. If you dont have it boot it stays resident after opening a document.
5. It destroys page breaks on non-native documents meaning that the majority of them have to be edited to print correctly.

Im sure there are more that i've purposefully blacked out of my memory.

Re:I hate Open Office

[rkeene517]

Golly! I see none of that. OpenOffice works fine for me and I am immersed in a MS world. There are a few minor quirks, but there are also quirks in MS Office. It sure is nice not to have to worry about licenses and such. And yes, it uses lots of memory, but then it does lots too. MS Office uses even more memory.

Re:I hate Open Office

[LocalH]

Hmm, did you bring these issues up with the OOo team, or did you just shrug your shoulders and go "fuck this shit, OOo sucks".

If you're not willing to help correct problems in open-source software, then YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BITCH ABOUT IT'S QUALITY (or lack thereof). PERIOD.

non-MS format will confuse and frighten

[walterbyrd]

For example, practically every outsourcing company that I have worked with (and there have been a few) are completely confused by the idea of a document no being in MS format.

Lord knows, I've tried to explain that ms-word will read RTF file. Some have even made an effort to understand, but it's just too difficult for them.

For that reason alone, I can't see a non-MS format catching on.

Re:Recent convert here…

[BandwidthHog]

Okay, so maybe 'typesetting' isn't the most appropriate term for this job. She's a nice little old lady who's written her first novel on an old Mac, and I'm getting it ready for printing draft copies so that her family (the subjects of said book) can proofread it. Formatting lists, poems, song lyrics, biblical quotes, etc.

I'm far from an amateur, I started typesetting in the late 80s. This is just a little self-published autobiography, not galley proofs for Doubleday. This is what I'd normally consider a Quark project, but since they're in perpetual footbullet mode these days, and I don't feel like taking the time to learn InDesign, I figured I'd see how OpenOffice does.

And no, she's not paying me very much at all. I charge her half price for my time, and sometimes I don't charge her anything at all. But as side jobs go, it beats the hell out of delousing Winboxes.

That's OK

[Prof. Pi]

... and tech understanding comes slowly to some of us.

Don't feel bad. Legal understanding comes slowly to a lot of us in the geek world too.

Office 2k3 has XML support

[Keeper]

Given that this is Slashdot, I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised to discover that nobody has pointed out that Office 2k3 has an XML document format: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=FE118952-3547-420A-A412-00A2662442D9&displa ylang=en

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[DannyO152]

I'm working to transition my office from Word Perfect and Word to OOo. My recommendation is export to pdf for any thing that has to make its way in the outside world. (And yes, I want it to print out over there the way it prints here in the office, working in a design related field, that aesthetic seems to go with the territory.)

But, someone should tell Kinko's (and others who receive digital copy) that documents in OOo and Scribus (and other programs) are coming. So you out there who can do something about this, check them out, download, install and make available for the stores to service their customers. It's not like there's this big licensing, capitalization hassle, right?

Re:OO in law offices - Off Topic

[ir0b0t]

My perception is that open source is perfect for small offices --- professional offices generally --- rural or urban. I've experienced fewer compatibility issues with Open Office than with WordPerfect --- esp. after the Montana Supreme Court adopted MS Word as its standard word processing format.

I'd be really happy to find others trying to make Open Office work in a professional environment. You're probably right that its wrong of me to try and blame that on the size of the population here. It has more to do with my being a newbie.

Have you noticed much use of Open Office in professional offices in Helena?

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[toddestan]

OpenOffice needs a viewer like the Word Viewer and PowerPoint viewer for Windows. Yes, I know you can download OpenOffice for free, but a viewer would help solve some of the problems of sharing files, as not everyone is ready to download a huge office suite just to view one file someone sends them.

Story from the front lines

[ChipMonk]

Boss wanted me to create a PostScript version of our corporate logo, so it could be scaled as needed.

Source: a poorly rendered GIF.

Equipment: one Linux machine, with OpenOffice.org installed.

I found the matching font, got the dots lined up, converted it to a traced object, found the right "burnt sienna" color... but that pukey-green was nowhere in any color selector I could find.

After hunting for nearly a half hour, for an edit box that would let me enter an arbitrary hex triplet, I just saved the file and quit OOo. Then I unzipped the document, opened the style sheet in NEdit, and changed the hex triplets by hand. Save, exit, re-zip, and open it in OOo to see if the changes were correct. Voila!

I never, never ever would have been able to do that in a Microsoft product. I will grant that Microsoft may have made the hex triplet entry somewhat more obvious, but that doesn't mean I would have been able to find it any more easily. They absolutely control how the user accesses the document. OOo lets you access it any way you want.

Re:Story from the front lines

[Anonymous Coward]

The hex input can be found in "Tools" -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Colors

CPH

Re:Story from the front lines

[MikeBabcock]

Some future possibilities:

• Gimp has a colour selector tool -- open the image in the Gimp and check the colour there
• There is a Gnome app that lets you grab an arbitrary on-screen colour in the same way, forget its name
• Get a professional designer to trace the *actual* logo out by hand with a tablet (its what we do)

Re:Story from the front lines

[ChipMonk]

Actually, I did open the original image in the Gimp to find the hex triplet I needed.

I chose OOo because I'm already familiar with it. There are tools out there for vectorizing bitmaps, but I needed something that day. I didn't have time to learn a new program.

Self-documenting formats aid reverse engineering

[tepples]

It's the clear and concise documentation that makes a good standard, not wether it's some fancy new ASCII-SGML-etc-text standard or not.

One purpose of XML is to make formats self-documenting, such that a competitive developer can infer the semantics from several examples of a valid file even if the publisher of a proprietary program refuses to disclose "clear and concise documentation" for the formats it writes.

Tried RTF?

[tepples]

saving to .doc format in OO isn't perfect either. Sometimes it creates a corrupt document and Word barfs

Microsoft Word's RTF import filter is much more robust than its .doc import filter. Try saving an OO.o text document as RTF, then renaming the resulting file to .doc. Word will know what to do.

Abuse of XML

[tepples]

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.

Office 2003 XML

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is some "XML" that I made using Word 2003:

<w:start w:val="1"/><w:nfc w:val="4"/><w:lvlText w:val="%2."/><w:lvlJc w:val="left"/><w:pPr><w:tabs><w:tab w:val="list" w:pos="1800"/></w:tabs>

The hell. It would take me days to decode what the tags mean! Here is a snipit from the same document (not same part of the document) in OOo XML:

<text:span text:style-name="T1">- ANOVA model: For all subjects with a given level, say j, of the explanatory variable, the mean</text:span></text:p><text:p text:style-name="P7">outcome is j and the distribution of outcomes is Normal. The errors (deviations of actual</text:p><text:p text:style-name="P6"><text:span text:style-name="T1">values from predicted value) are independent and the spread (sig-squared) is the same for every j.</text:span>

Much easier to decode :)

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[ultranova]

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.

Why ? So every word processor will be compatible with Word macro viruses ?

Why does a word processor (or a spreadsheet, or whatever) need an embedded programming language ?

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[mcn]

Exactly. I hate the Office2003 bluish tube toolbars. How can I change its color to gray that blends well with the rest of Windows apps, much like OfficeXP's grey flat toolbars? Pls don't tell me to revert back to Windows Classic.

small but slow

[rice_burners_suck]

I can tell you that I've noticed two things about OOo's document format.

First of all, when I opened a large Microsoft Word document and then saved it into OOo format, the resulting file was roughly two-thirds the size of the original. Thus, OOo files take up less space. This might not seem quite so important in the modern age of hard drives bigger than Just Johnnie's brain implant, but it can make the difference between a file fitting on a floppy disk and being just too damn big.

The other thing I noticed is that OOo takes a long time to save documents. I haven't looked at the source code, but I assume that when the document is in memory, it is in some format, and that format is converted to XML upon being saved. Either this encoding process takes a long time because of the inherent differences between the in-memory format and the on-disk format, or it is a theoretically efficient process with a slow implementation.

So, yeah... OOo documents are small to store and slow to save.

Re:small but slow

[m50d]

Actually, there's a simpler thing about openoffice documents that explains both these properties. It's simply that their zipped. I'm pretty sure there's some way to get it to use "archive" zips (an "uncompressed" option in the file formats?) and then saving becomes quick.

What silly....

[jotaeleemeese]

Let the market speak. If stability means nothing to you, good.

To me it does, and it will be many individual decissions regarding this waht will shape the market.

You wishes in regards to what should be other people's priorities are frankly childish musings.

Why bother with WYSIWYG?

[mihib]

When you can do anything you want with nice Software like LaTeX and R. Evolution gave humans ten fingers for typing, not two for clicking. So you are quite faster typing than searching around, find your mouse pointer, search the button, find the button click it, click on the text again.... If usability is taken into discussion, think of how useable simple editors are. Much more than all this fsck WYSIWYG things.

Re:Why bother with WYSIWYG?

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention the fact that LaTeX uses semantic markup, forcing you to focus on what you mean, rather than how it looks. I read a report about a year ago showing that students marks went up by about 10% on average after they switched to using LaTeX from a word processor[1]. I can well believe this. Not to mention the fact that LaTeX documents are very human-readable in their source form (it hardly takes a genius to work out that \chapter{This is a Chapter Heading} and \section{This is a Section Heading}), and produces PDF documents with a far nicer text layout than any word processor I've seen (constrained as they are by the requirement that their layout engines run in realtime).

I just looked at the OpenOffice file format specification. The page from which it is downloaded states:

The document type definition provides a handy reference against which all OpenOffice.org XML files can be validated against.

Presumably brought to us by the department of redundancy department. The specification itself is a PDF that was obviously created in OpenOffice. It is 571 pages long, and yet doesn't include a PDF table of contents, making it very hard to navigate (these are created automatically from any LaTeX document including the hyperref package). It contains things that look like hyperlinks. These probably aren't meant to be - they are XML namespaces - but OpenOffice has converted them to hyperlinks (and made them blue to highlight this) and then completely failed to make them clickable in the PDF. This is completely inconsistent. Either they are links, in which case clicking on them should do something, or they are not links, in which case they should not be randomly made blue and underlined.

[1] A word processor does the same thing to words that a food processor does to food.

Re:Why bother with WYSIWYG?

[mihib]

The way i create my LaTeX documents is: i sort my thoughts. Thats all, i just give structure to the things i'm thinking of, and pling: document done.

Well....

[jotaeleemeese]

... if that is the worst you have to say about OO,org (that a fscking button is not were you want it) then I thing you have "MSoffice-itis", in which the patient thinks that user usability equates putting all the buttons in the same place where MS has choosen to do so.

That this is the gravest problem you have to talk about shows tha OO.org is a mature application ready for use.

The wonders of the Internet.

[jotaeleemeese]

What would we do nowadays without it?. I am sitting in London, UK, having a nice apple juice to finish my breakfast, in my office overlooking the Thames river:

Missoula population statistics

Mexico City's population: ~ 16000000 (give or take, depending who you believe).
London's population: ~ 8000000
Mexico City's Azteca stadium capacity (all comfortably sitted): 110000.
Missoula, Monatana, US: ~57000.

I don't know, but Missoula looks small to me.

Re:The wonders of the Internet.

[HoldenCaulfield]

Well, it's all relative. Missoula is the second largest city in Montana (Billings is the largest with just under 90k). Of course, MT is pretty sparse, with a total population of a little over 902k and a whopping 6.2 people/square mile. In other words, Missoula is large for MT, but small in an absolute sense . . .

Here's a PDF with Montana cities' populations and ranks.

Then they are dumb.

[jotaeleemeese]

Goverments and IT heads should be thinking about this. Otherewise the burden in future generations (your children and their children) to access information would make the Y2K scenario like a picnic.

Shortermism may be all the rage in business and politics but little by littel people will wake up and realize that longer term views are needed if we are to spare future generations of unnecessary pain.

Re:Then they are dumb.

[Grishnakh]

Honestly, you'd think that everyone would have learned this lesson from the Y2K Scare. Back in the 70's and 80's, people wrote a bunch of COBOL code with 2-digit years, and look what happened. Yet people have only learned not to use 2-digit years; they haven't learned the greater lesson, which is that anything we write now may be still in use and very important 30 or 50 years from now, and that we shouldn't rely on anything that can't be counted on for that long.

Another good example of this is the Domesday project, where the British government had the Domesday book converted to some weird proprietary laserdisc format in the 80's, readable only on specially-designed computers, and now there's no computers left that can read the discs.

Re:Recent convert here…

[TheRaven64]

I used OpenOffice as an undergraduate, but after spending a day recovering a short (about 20-pages) document in which it had decided to randomly move all of the images down between one and two pages (not to the next page, in most cases, just down off the printable page, every time I pressed the print button) I decided to bite the bullet and spend the two days it takes to learn to use LaTeX. Since then, I haven't used OpenOffice writer at all. My LaTeX files are written in semantic markup, so anyone can read them and know what they mean (\section{Some Section Heading} is a lot more human readable than OASIS). When I need to give these to someone else, they are converted into another published format - PDF (using typesetting algorithms that produce much nicer output than that from OpenOffice Writer).

I also can't stand the UI on OpenOffice Impress - the only presentation tool with a worse UI than PowerPoint. Fortunately, Keynote also uses a published XML-based format for its presentation files, so I can be sure of keeping them safe as well.

Re:Embed in pdf files

[TheRaven64]

An idea similar to this is already implemented by MS products for embedded objects. When you embed an Excel graph (for example) in a word document it embeds the Excel data and a BMP image. If the machine you try to open it on doesn't have Excel, it simply loads the image instead, allowing you to view - but not edit - the graph.

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[TiggsPanther]

Technically wouldn't this be possible? Between the source and the document format being open then writing a standalone viewer should be easy enough for someone with the coding knowhow.

A small viewer application would be so useful - especially a standalone executable rather than an install-required package. Especially when trying to distribute files to tech-savvy people. Attach a file and a link to a (known legitimate) download page. Plus you'd know it'd display properly without any cross-format issues that tend to crop up when saving to a non-native format.

MS Dead???

[Ripplet]

From the article:

After all: software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?

Going to its grave? Which company would that be then?

Yay, long live our new OOoverlords!

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[TheRaven64]

I don't think MS Office is a good solution to either of your problems. For a group assignment, you are likely to have multiple people working on the same document at once. This calls for some kind of revision control and collaboration mechanism. Using a plain text markup format, such as LaTeX (or even HTML) in a CVS or SVN repository would be a better choice. In you second case, you want to be absolutely sure that you know exactly what changes have been made to the document. Sending a PDF and having an annotated PDF returned would be a better choice. You could then send them a second draft (which their lawyers would, of course, go over again). Failing that, you should use a format, such as plain text, on which it is easy for you to run a program like diff and extract the changes.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[TheRaven64]

It would depend on the length of the file. I would much rather that anything longer than a couple of pages was a PDF, since they are less computationally expensive to render (and use far less RAM, since you don't have to build a DOM tree etc). They also have the advantage of supporting tables of contents in the meta-data, allowing me to navigate them far more easily than HTML documents (and yes, PDFs do support hyperlinks, both within the document and to arbitrary URLs). Finally, a PDF document created from a proper typesetting package has far better text layout than a realtime rendered HTML file, making it a lot easier on the eyes when reading large amounts of it.

The honest answer to your question is that I would click on the view as HTML link in google, scan the first few paragraphs, and if I decided the document was worth reading I would go back and grab the PDF.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[TheRaven64]

Completely off topic, but do you know of any free tools for annotating PDFs? The only application I've found that claims to be able to is Adobe Acrobat, and it seems rather a lot to pay for one feature I would actually use.

For those who haven't learnt the lesson of history

[TractorBarry]

On the wander back from the pub last night I got to thinking about open formats (yeah I'm that sad..) and came to the following conclusion.

A long time ago the bible was only available in Latin. Very, very few lay people could understand Latin and hence most had to use the services of a priest to read, and interpret, said tome for them. In other words a nice little earner for the priests who carved themselves a niche as "official middlemen to Grud" and who resisted all attempts to break up this monopoly. (Hmmm... methinks they were more like the *AA of their day)

Anyway I think it's simple. Proprietary data formats return us to the spirit of these times.

Lets face it, the only use for a computer is as a tool (admittedly a tremendously versatile and powerful tool). To all intents and purposes the only thing that's really important are the results of using that tool. i.e your data.

Saving your data in a non open format is like putting your work at the mercy of a "digital priest". It's simply stupid. And on this note then having had numerous run ins with data in crappy undocumented formats over the years I have also learnt the lesson of the Unix masters first hand. i.e. Wherever possible use plain text (ASCII or EBCIDIC)

Personally I will no longer use a tool that doesn't produce data in an open format. The tool itself can be licensed however the writers choose (I'm quite happy to pay for good tools) but if MY data isn't stored in an open format then, unless there really is no alternative and I simply must get the job done, I won't use the tool.

People who don't understand this argument leave themselves open to extortion and, quite simply, deserve everything they get.

Furthermore if data's held in an open format everyone can compete on a level playing field to produce the best tool to manipulate it.

So, to get back on topic, not only is OpenOffice.org a very capable office suite but the data's held in a published open format and the authors are commited to keeping it that way. It's got my vote. It's on my desktop. It's staying there.

but...office 2003

[mydigitalself]

one of the major changes to the office suite was it's support of XML file formats. Word, Excel and PPT all have the ability to save to XML and the specification is published. you can also programmatically edit the document through automation using XPATH, which should be cross platform as well.

Offtopic: 80ies vs. 80s.

[Sique]

I used the 'ies' form, because it's actually not "eightys" but "eighties" ;). So the correct form should be '80(-y)ies', but this is a letter longer and uses two more shifts than the word 'eighties' written fully in letters, so the saving in typing is lost. But who am I to argue anyway, me not being a native speaker?

Re:Open document formats vs accepted document form

[mattyrobinson69]

I use ms's formats by default in open office because the only time i write files in OO is when im writing something for college, which uses MS Office.

Just changed the default in preferences, and it doesn't try to save in OO's format after that.

Re:Hate to point out the obvious...

[mrbcs]

I agree that it's a horrible format, but how can we get users to change to any open format? We have a hard enough time just getting them to change browsers.

What about

[beforewisdom]

What about all open source word processors use ONE common open source file format?

That would make it more likely that commercial word processors, corporations, the government etc would support it.....which would make it easier for people to eventually migrate to open source word processors.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[slapout]

I don't know Microsoft's policies with Office, but I think some companies upgrade their software every few years because the vender tells them "we're not going to support that version anymore." I've never understood that myself. If the software is working fine for what you're doing, why do you need support? I used Atari computers for several years after they stopped being manufactured. Software doesn't suddenly stop working because the company that made it goes away/drops support/whatever.

Re:Why not just .pdf?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The majority of your arguments about the difficulties of PDF are the result of your PDF reader, not of the PDF format. Being slow to load, slow to scroll, jumping at page breaks, heavy on resources, and lack of accessibility for the blind are all solved issues for preview.app, the default PDF reader on OSX. You still cannot change the fonts easily and it is not as easily modified as HTML. I find that using PDFs in Windows is painfully slow. The sad state of multitasking in Windows results in your whole machine grinding to a halt while a PDF is loaded from a Web page. Before OSX and preview.app, I too hated PDFs, but now that I see how well they can work, I realize that it is Acrobat Reader, not the PDF format, that is largely to blame. I suspect the lack of hatred for PDFs on Slashdot is related to the number of people here that use OSX.

will this future proof doc formats?

[jedi63]

As time passes, older proprietary formats get used less and less, until the s/w they need to open these documents is no longer available or the s/w is progressed into supporting newer formats leaving the older formats unuseable without conversion.

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.

Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we

[sirReal.83.]

I agree, it's not as simple as I made it out to be. There are easier ways, such as:
uuencode -m file file > file.uu && uuencode -m newfile file > newfile.uu && diff -u file.uu newfile.uu | patch file.uu && uudecode file.uu && rm newfile* *.uu
or just use rsync.

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[abertoll]

I don't know who you are referring to when you say "most people." Maybe you're talking about businesses. As far as I can tell, new Windows computers don't come with Office, they come with Works, and most people aren't going to drop $100+ for Office.

Re:OO in law offices - Off Topic

[HoldenCaulfield]

Well, I work for the state, so we're pretty tightly bonded to MS, as most large organizations are. I also work with non-profits, and they're largely bound to MS as well, mainly because there aren't many tech savvy people in non-profits. Though I think the Montana Legal Services Association uses a lot of open source I think they're using squirrel mail, some open source online time clock, and are talking about using Sunbird, the Mozilla calendar project (they don't run Exchange and they have no calendaring at the moment. . . )

Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we

[Grishnakh]

There's a good reason for this. There's multiple XML files in a single OOo document, and if there's any included images, those are saved in the ZIP file as-is. Basically, the OOo document formats are containers.

While this does make it more difficult to diff the contents, it makes much more sense overall (how would you diff a file with a binary image encapsulated in it?).

For organizations that really need to be able to diff the contents of OOo documents, and use them with a version control system, it should be fairly easy to write some sort of Perl front-end for CVS to do this. If you google for it, chances are someone's started such a project already.

Now compare this to MS Office, where the ability to diff isn't even possible.

Re:What features are missing? Did you ever use OO

[eric17]

It is not so much functionality, but attention to detail, and outright bugs. (OO 1.1.1 w/Suse 9.1)

I tried for hours trying to get sections numbered like "1.1.3.2", working, to no avail. I'm sure this is a minor bug, but it was critical for what I wanted to do. So OO failed for me.

This is the one thing I remember from the experience, but there was several other minor problems. It needs work, hopefully it gets it.

Re:OO in law offices - Off Topic

[ir0b0t]

Interesting you should mention MLSA as my work with them originally inspired my own interest in open source. (I worked there for 2 years and have a connection that goes back further than that.)

They do have calendaring through the Kemp software (proprietary) which they purchase show compliance on their LSC grant. There's a lot of variation among offices as to what Kemp is used to do.

I'm not familiar with squirrel mail or the online time clock, but Firefox and Thunderbird are of course available to them when they're ready.

MLSA is poised to be a real leader on open source because they've received national recognition from LSC for their commitment to technological approaches to poverty law (video conferencing, lawhelp.org, etc.)

However, to my knowledge, MLSA and LSC (national) have spent their grant money on proprietary solutions for the most part.

The only organized effort behind using open source for poverty law that I know about is called the Open Source Initiative. It was organized at a national level and has done interesting stuff.

There's also a cool article in Clearinghouse Review about XML, but otherwise its slim pickins.

Re:OO in law offices - Off Topic

[HoldenCaulfield]

Hmm . . . I guess I should have prefaced my comments about MLSA by saying it was the Helena office. From my understanding, the Helena office doesn't use any calendaring/scheduling, besides an in/out white board in their reception area. I did forget to mention their use of Jabber and the Exodus client which is GPL software.

My knowledge of their office comes through currently serving as an AmeriCorps*VISTA here in Helena, and knowing some of their VISTA members.

As for open source being used in poverty programs in general, the pickings are definitely slim. My project last year was implementing after-school computer labs for kids. While I felt comfortable building the Boys and Girls Club that I did most of my work at a intranet web server, installing LiveJournal's server software on it for their members so that the kids could keep journals in the protected sandbox of the intranet, installed some wiki software for them to play with, etc etc, I do know that it wasn't sustainable as the expertise isn't there at the club. Anyway, if you want to continue this discussion, feel free to e-mail me . . . hairylunch[at]hotmail[dot]com

Re:[OT] devolution of MS Office

[Crispin Cowan]

This isn't an argument against OOo; it's an argument against PowerPoint97. (Consider that basically the same thing could have happened if your colleague had been using Office 2003.)

Except that it did not happen. Another collegue in this office does use PP2003, and no such problem ever occurred. OpenOffice was defnitely the element that abrupty introducted the compatibility problem that made PP97 suddenly obsolete.

Crispin

Re:WtF?!

[Crispin Cowan]

I'm still asking why you have not installed OOo instead of upgrading Office. THAT document shoud open correctly within OOo.

Try to pay attention :) I do have OOo installed, I have used it extensively, and it sucks so bad that I find it unusable, and prefer to switch back to PP97. But now, because someone is using OO in my organization, I can no longer use PP97 and so I have to go get PP2003.

Crispin