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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.
There's a cool interview with Sam Hiser of OpenOffice.org here
Why no SVG support, then?
Someone had to do it.
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.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284
I wish people would stop touting stability as a superiority of software products. I use OO and MS Office regularly, and both have crashed on me, or done very flaky things, such as refusing to save a file for some unknown reason. I'm a more than average user, but not some elitist who has configured my machine perfectly, and if I can't get things not to crash, then your average user isn't going to be able to either. They'll try the program, excited by it's superior crash record, it'll crash once, and then they'll get burned, blame the software and never try again. There's plenty of good reasons to use OSS software, but stability wise, it's no better, and note no worse, in my books than an MS product.
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.
Beep beep.
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
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.
I'm laughing at clouds.
... almost every file I save in Open Office gets saved as a .doc/.xls rather than an OOo format (I can't even think of the file extensions of the top of my head, thats how infrequently I use them). If the file I am saving has to be sent to anyone, or opened on a machine other than my own, I have to go with Microsoft compatability, even though it annoys me intensly.
Write a Firefox Extension that enables OpenOffice documents to be viewed in the browser, or edited if OOo is present on the system? (yes, this would be a lot of work)
.Doc files and the free MS Word Viewer to distribute written documents.
Suddenly you have an alternative to the traditional recipe of using
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The 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.
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:
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.
There's SVG support. It's just not particularly good.
http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm
However someone is working on it, and there's enough documentation out there, you can too.
"XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format..."
I'd say that's a pretty good reason right there, especially compared to a non-human-readable one (MS).
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.
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... ;-)
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
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.
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.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
"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
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.
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.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
script the .doc with a macro virus.
that'll show them.
...
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...
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
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.