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?"

Comments

OpenDoc?

[generic-man]

Isn't "OpenDoc" a much older standard than OpenDocument that never quite caught on? I remember being so jazzed as an OS/2 user that OS/2 Warp 4 would support OpenDoc, then... well, we all know what happened to OS/2 after that.

In any case, blah blah open standards good blah blah down with proprietary crap.

Re:Never happen

[eln]

Most likely, Office will support OpenDocument format, both reading and writing, but will continue to aggressively develop new features for their own proprietary format that OpenDocument does not provide. In other words, they'll deal with it much like OpenOffice deals with Word format: They will read it (and write it), but not necessarily perfectly, and it won't be their preferred format.

Microsoft has to know by now that basic word processing functionality is far too common and easy to copy to make it a cornerstone of your product line. Word itself is an important part of Office, but most of the "innovation" in Office in recent years has not been in the Word component, but rather in the other pieces, and more importantly in how the different pieces interoperate.

What about browser standards?

[bogaboga]

Could the same paradigm be extended to the browser and browser standards? I mean, just like Massachusetts kind of stood its ground on document formats, it goes an extra mile and does something similar with the browser.

This would be very beneficial since every web page would look the *same* and act the same regardless of the browser use to view it.

What about that?

Support will be useless for the most part

[Jeff85]

Even if Microsoft includes support for an OpenDocument format, the only thing it will do is enable MS Word users to read documents from other word processors such as OpenOffice or StarOffice. However, I'm sure MS will still have the default save setting be their proprietary .doc format, which Joe User will automatically choose when he saves his document which someone who only has OpenOffice will try to read. Sure, OpenOffice does its best to render .doc files, but sometimes it still looks disfigured. What MS really needs to do is open up its .doc format.

Big deal

[Dracos]

Even if MS decided to realize what interoperability actually is, the only reason they would add OpenDoc support to Office is to grab back the millions of dollars they'd lose on MA not buying Office licenses. This is precisely why MA is switching, and whether or not MS can FUD them into going back to Office remains to be seen. I predict promises that will ultimately go unfulfilled.

Oh, They'll Support It...

[Greyfox]

Just like they support Posix -- just enough to be considered in bids by government organizations that mandate the format. There may be tools out there that do it better, but the "Supports Opendoc" checkbox on those contracts don't specify how well that support works, just that it's there. And although OpenOffice might be free, government IT bids will necessarily go through the 3 companies on the planet that feel it's profitable to do that work despite all the paperwork, and they prefer Microsoft products. Don't think to take your independent consulting firm into the bidding process either. You won't even get past the form WXD-423. Assuming you can even find one.

Why not use HTML?

[Psx29]

I never really understood this but how come in this day and age the default format for text isn't html? It's a standard that can be read on tons of devices, it can contain images or text or whatever, why not have word processors use it??

Re:Why not use HTML?

[csirac]

I agree to a certain extent, and I think if you were to attempt to build an office workflow based around "paperless" and entirely electronic document exchange, HTML could fit the bill quite well. But I can see a possible reason as to why HTML isn't used for more inter-office document exchange.

1) It quickly becomes a collection of files (figures, pictures, diagrams, charts, formulas, etc) which are inconvenient to manage. You have to attach say six different files to your email, or mess around with zipping it up, likewise at the recipient end.
2) Printing

As for (1), there's Microsoft's Compiled HTML which forms the basis of their help file format, not sure why that isn't an option in FLOSS (maybe it is, I haven't researched).

For (2), people want to control how the formatting looks on the printed page. You don't get that in HTML. And most word-processing, let's face it, is meant to be printed on paper. Depressing that computers have yet to provide a solution to the paperless office... but that's the way things are.

In my opinion, documents > 5 pages or so should be written in LaTeX but that's just me :-) (and for those that groan at this thought, take a look at Lyx).

Why this will happen

[foolinator]

Having a lot of IT friends in Europe and Asia, I know that a LOT of organizations are now using open office as a document standard. Since OO doesn't work 100% well with MS formats, allowing MS Office to be 100% compatable with OO will make the US companies (who are still obsessed with MS Office) more easily work with their OO businesses. If MS didn't support it, then the US companies will begin to use both MS Office and OO - which will start the push for US companies to use OO.

It's a win for MS to do this. They've done this with Java in the past and it proved damaging to the Java world.