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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...
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.
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?
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.
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
Say Hello to ActiveOpenDocument-X! It's just like OpenDocument only it's more fully featured!!!*
.Net for best results.
*New features require Microsoft Office Vista XP 2008 Professional and
I think Microsoft could actually take OpenDocument support in one of two directions:
1. Basically, how you put it. They would only support it enough so that it would be that extra bullet point at the bottom of the feature list "(blah blah, marketing drivel)...now with OpenDocument support!"
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program. I just wouldn't be surprised when I've seen two identical machines with identical software on the same network transfer a Word file from one computer to come out garbled on the other end.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
FTA :
"and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will not become inaccessible in the future"
lessen the likelihood..... that public information... *will not become inaccessible*
-- 2010 --
User : "I can't access Files on the Server"
Admin: "Yeah thats just part of the IT Policy"
User : "WTF?!?"
Admin: "Yeah I know, it's fucked up but I didn't write it..."
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version. Since the grunts at the keyboards hate change, tons of political pressure will be put on the people in charge to stick with MS, this offer will be accepted. Then after a couple of years of buggy and disfunctional betas we will get to the final decision. If others also demand OpenDocument it will finally go production. Otherwise they will just pull the plug on it, the current IT team in MA will have been quietly replaced by then and the whole thing will be forgotten.... except by anyone else who is thinking of taking a similar stand.
Democrat delenda est
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!
I don't know why people are putting up with all these shenanigans from Microsoft. This should be an indicator to everyone that they're only out to hassle the community.
As such, any product organization should begin to switch to a system such as LaTeX for their document formatting needs. And for those who suggest that it is too complex for memos and other smaller documents, the perfect answer to that is to just stick with plain text files.
While the learning curve of something like LaTeX is a bit more than that of Word, it is far more powerful. Using a system such as LaTeX you can easily produce some very complex documents, and they look great. You don't have to worry about proprietary binary or XML formats, because LaTeX source files are plain text files. You can easily transmit them in source form, or you can create PDF documents when you need the presentation to be exact.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
:-) (and for those that groan at this thought, take a look at Lyx).
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
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program.
All they have to do is put the little balloon that says that "saving to OpenDocument may cause loss of formatting", which will cause 95% of the people out there to save to the proprietary file type.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
I suspect that MS support will be like that in Excel with CSV files. I choose "Save As", hit the drop down, scroll through the list for .csv, select that, hit save.
.csv file, change one value and resave it...not using any fancy features.
I then get a dialog box saying something like "This file may contain features that cannot be saved if you continue to save in this format. Are you sure you want to save in this format?" Well, yes. I scrolled through the list and picked that format.
This behavior occurs even if you open a
Kind thoughts do not change the world