Microsoft Office Formats Not Really Being Opened

Contradicting this earlier article claiming otherwise, smith_barney writes "Contrary to reports, Microsoft is not opening up its proprietary Office XML schemas. Essentially, the state of Massachusetts is simply repositioning what it considers an 'open format.' According to a report in BetaNews, Microsoft told the state it would ease licensing restrictions, but only for 'end users who merely open and read government documents.' This hasn't stopped Microsoft from tooting its horn, but Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox says, 'Buzz about so-called open formats is little more than PR FUD.'"

Comments

OpenOffice.org

[16K Ram Pack]

Just tell them that you're going to be installing this on all your computers.

Seriously, how many people need stuff in Office that isn't in OpenOffice.org?

Re:Umm....

[TomorrowPlusX]

We probably were all wishing for the same, but that said, "opening" the format is probably harder than it sounds.

My understanding of the Office document formats -- which comes entirely from reading rants by OO.org and other projects to write office suites so take it with a big grain of salt -- is that the format itself is made up of serializations of stuff like activex control states. In other words, non-trivial.

I don't know if you or anybody here ever wrote a BeOS "replicant", but it was sort of like ActiveX in that they were serializable classes which could be instantiated by any program, by dlopening the replicant's source executable and running the exported code with the serialized state as initialization parameters. It was really cool -- an app could send a replicant to another app and whammo, you had stuff like a web-browser embedded on the desktop running in the desktop process, or a tray-item using your app's code, but running in the deskbar's process.

Anyway, given that Office uses this kind of approach, it would be near 100% *impossible* to get the state out without the source activex component. Unless the state itself is described in a 100% abstract manner. Which I doubt. The data is almost certainly just a serialization of the internal state of the activex control which created/modified/rendered it.

Now, I know that this kind of stuff only applies to Office when Word or Excel is embedding charts or whatnot from other parts of the office suite, but the fact is this is a useful ( and good ) way to get interoperability, even if it means that it's completely non-portable. Given MS's history, I doubt they've taken a simple approach.

I'm sure there could be better ways, and I imagine OO.org is taking a maximum-interoperability approach...

Anyway, I'm just saying. I don't think MS *could* open the format -- at least not as regards document embedding.

Rant over.

Re:Many people aren't sensitive to GUI design.

[SgtChaireBourne]

I installed Open Office for a staff member of a customer's company. She had been using a computer with Microsoft Word before. She didn't notice that anything had changed.

A similar thing happened to my dad a year or so ago, except he tricked himself. He likes to download and try out software and put OOo on his computer and had been using it along side MS Word for some months. One day he opened a document with revisions, reviewed the revisions and made his own changes, and transferred it back to the author -- all in OOo. He didn't notice until he was finished that it was OOo and not MS-Word. He had intended to use MS-Word, but since then it's been largely neglected and probably won't make it onto the next machine he buys.

It's funny that the group that whines about tools not being identical to MS' current version don't get up in arms when the change applies to MS products. Current versions become the old version and the menus and functions get changed all around anyway.