Massachusetts Finalizes OpenDocument Standard Plan

wellington map writes "The state of Massachusetts has finalized a proposed move to an open, nonproprietary format for office documents, a plan that involves phasing out versions of Microsoft's Office productivity suite deployed in the state's executive branch agencies. Massachusetts expects its agencies to develop phased migration plans away from productivity suites that do not support OpenDocument, with a target implementation date of January 1, 2007. Looks like it's finally cemented after some heated discussions."

Comments

Re:Just the beginning

[spauldo]

I think another reason why MS Office isn't going away anytime soon is that the format of the word processing document is only a small part of an office suite.

What you're not seeing is a standard for the other parts of the office suites - spreadsheets and slide documents tend to get passed around quite a bit.

Granted, most slide documents (talkin' powerpoint here) are pointless and stupid, but the execs just love 'em (nothing like getting an email with an attached powerpoint document to tell you the softball team is meeting at 3pm in conference room B - meanwhile the IT department is going on about email abuse from the lower ranks...). PDF can mostly take the place of these, so it's not that big a deal, especially with openoffice's PDF export capability.

I think spreadsheets are next large point of incompatability. CSV files are all right for table-based data, but they won't do crap for calculations and pivot tables and such. Businesses share these all the time, either standalone or embedded in other documents. Graphs and charts are similar - especially dynamic ones that change with the data. It's not unusual for businesses to have a number of spreadsheets that are amazingly complicated and can't be replaced easily - hell, there's still quite a few businesses around who still use Lotus documents for this reason. Filters aren't perfect, but the data needs to be.

Access is bad about supporting its own files from version to version, so I won't include that here. Hopefully openoffice will do better on this point than Microsoft has.

We won't be rid of Microsoft until someone forces at least spreadsheets to be open. Until then, Excel will be the de facto standard and there's not much that can be done about it.