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Office + OpenDocument, Never Say Never
barryfreed writes "There's a blog entry by Andy Updegrove at ConsortiumInfo.org that says Microsoft has officially stated to him that support of OpenDocument in MS Office could happen. Microsoft sent the statement in a response to an article Updegrove wrote called Massachusetts and OpenDocument: A Brave New World?"
Dont' call it OpenDoc...
sigh...
must... stay... awake...
Office 12 will not write .doc by default, but rather an XML-based format called .docx. More information is available at the Microsoft Office XML Formats blog.
For more information, click here.
The original title of this article was "Office + OpenDoc, Never Say Never." The editor corrected the headline, so all the posts saying "Hey, I remember OpenDoc as something different" are now complaining about nothing.
For more information, click here.
Here's the abstract from the featured article:Maybe they meant: "and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will (remove: "not") become inaccessible in the future due to changes in proprietary software."
Maybe they need to worry less about the format being open and more about the text making sense
OpenDoc is a compound document technology ala Micsoft's OLE (think embedding a spreadsheet in a word processor document that dynamically changes). OpenDocument is an XML based document format.
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
Sometimes, people mistakenly refer to OpenDocument (short for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) as OpenDoc.
JUST DO IT. Go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and download it. It installs cleanly, uninstalls cleanly, and does not interfere at all with your current install of MS Office (just choose "NO" when asked if you want to link OpenOffice to MS Office file types).
Use it, and I bet most, if not all of you, will find yourself not needing MS Office.
Oh, and try that Save to PDF button. Yum.
Good night, and good luck!
Sure it will happen. Otherwise they might not be able to sell their software to i.e. public services in the UK. The UK government requires that all data that is stored by software must be stored in an open format such that even in hundred years when the software does not exist anymore, the datafile can still be read.
While I agree in theory this is a good idea HTML is not really a great format for portability. Although a lot of devices read HTML and it's very platform neutral it does take some skill and effort to make it consistent across platforms. So that bugs the publishing crowd who wants control over the flow and layout of a document. Ah, CSS solves that! But my next point illustrates why this is also problematic. You mentioned containing images; images and other non-textual data in an HTML document are just links. When your browser hits a web server both sides know how to deal with this properly. Have you ever tried to explain to a colleague who tried to email an HTML attachment why their pictures didn't get sent with the message? Object linking in HTML makes it problematic when it comes to end users passing it around. It works great for the client/server web model but tends to fall apart when you try to force other applications to use it. Just look at the mess that is HTML email.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
If you open a .doc file, you get the same kind of message when you save. I want to keep a certain document in .doc format for my co-workers, but I only want to use OOo. So they penalize me with this stupid form that you can't turn off.
No.
.docx files, which are ZIP-compressed XML files. These XML files are in plain text; the only thing binary about them is binary attachments (such as PNG files) that are referenced in the document itself.
.docx files are not blobs wrapped in XML tags; they are actual bundles of human-readable files just like OpenOffice.org files.
Microsoft Office Word "12" will write
Please read this blog, by a real Microsoft software engineer who actually accepts and responds to questions from concerned citizens like yourself.
And if you still want to play lawyer, here are some posts that you can visit and leave comments on or even TrackBack to your own blog. You can USENET-style-reply to this comment, but if you want your questions answered then take them to a Microsoft software engineer.
The myth of the Binary Key, a myth which you still believe as fact
Comments from some dude about OpenDocument
Some background on the reasons why Microsoft chose an XML format, and information on how their choices predate and differ from OpenDocument
License wankery
License wankery, part 2
Follow-up on comments regarding license wankery
For more information, click here.
They already do have "features" specific to their format.
Read "Microsoft's Approach to Disclosures of XML File Formats for Word 2003 and Excel 2003" available here (pdf warning) or you can view the Google "CCIA-XML" html version.