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MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?
J. Random Luser writes "Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'." From the ZDNet article: "Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn't a matter of principle. Microsoft isn't opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an 'extremely liberal' license."
It's one thing to read/write a document format through a filter.
It's another to utilize the format, i.e., as the underlying default storage format.
You know, it's kind of clever: Support it, but only in the new version.
MS Office also had support for WordPerfect files. If you want to have the leading Office software you must have support for your competition. OpenOffice has support for Word documents so it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same.
Nice to see that some customers are not going to be pushed around into what they should use ...
.. it is just another format that they should support .. like all the other (including 3rd party) plugins that are available for importing/exporting Documents.
...
Makes sense really
I just hope that it will never be an "Embrace and Extend" scenario
And even if it is, it won't work.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
The company just announced support for PDF
I imagine that this will add extra features to PDFs which Adobe's (or anyone elses) Reader won't be able to handle.
Except Microsoft's Reader, obviously.
Summation 2
Microsoft has no choice. Either they will support the format, in a usable form, or be increasingly left out of government, city/state/country level, contracts.
I am surprised at how quickly ODF is becoming a must have feature. It makes perfect sense of course, but I think so many people have gotten so use to the "Microsoft is always the winner" mentality that they are having a hard time imagining that anyone would mandate an open format for documents.
With companies such as Sun and IBM opening up their software and such, I read magizines that try to support the idea that other companies need to do the same or be left behind. Do you think Microsoft is getting that hint or is there another reason why they would be using open formats? Surely there aren't enough open office users yet for them to be worried about that portion of the market. After all, most users of Open Office use that suite because they hate Microsoft.
SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'."
Ehm... Since when WindowsInstaller(s) have been 'platform independent'? Do I miss something?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
What are the odds that this will be import only and you won't be able to write the open document standard?
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Actually they seem to be able to dump a few extra profit!s throughout the process.
No France
Can't they write it into the ODF spec that "no extensions can be made" ? That way a Word pocessor decides to add features into the ODF it would be considered non compliant? That is they won't be advetise they are ODF x.xx compiant (and therefore not meet the state requirement), similar to how they had to call Java J++ or something once they extended that.
.doc and hope odf never catches up because as it stands .doc is ahead of everyone in the game.
I think if enough protest occurs to M$FT on this issue, they won't go the embrace, extend, extinguish route because they have enough bad pres as it is. They can simply rely on improving
No, really, it is. If MS Word can open and save in OpenDocument XML format, then Microsoft can honestly say, "Sure, Mr. Corporate Buyer, go ahead and experiment with that open source stuff. And when you're done, you can rest assured that your data can safely return to Microsoft Word with nary a scratch."
At the very least it is a slight nod to the increasing public awareness of open source software.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
You only pay $700 for a premium license and if there are as many versions of Office as there will be Windows, I expect you will probably pay even MORE.
So yes, be 'liberal' with your $700 license for the software -- who cares about the format if it will cost you $700 to read it?
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
They've heard that Open Office is beating them in bloat, and are scrambling to get back on top.
I know, of course not. After all, they have one less MS product to look at each day.
It would be nice to have a way to go back and forth (between work and home, for example) with consistant results.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Not very quietly it would seem.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I find it interesting that Microsoft will support other document formats (such as WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?) but not OpenDocument.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
This sounds a novel ploy. The next time Microsoft are asked to conform to some open standard, they will announce a relationship with a mysterious company in, say, the Yemen whose staff, it may even be insinuated, consist entirely of fanatical Muslims and convicted rapists. At that point, the Microsofties will ask the politicians on the interviewing panel to sign off on the tax dollars for the work, to be remitted directly to the nutters concerned, and sit back and watch the politicos slowly melt.
In any case, it's all just window-dressing. Most folks will just click on the "Save" (doc format) button. Few will know how to obtain and install a third-party plug-in, or go through the hassle of doing a "Save As" assuming Microsoft make it even as easy as that. Chances are they won't, I guess.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Even if they write into the standard that there can be absolutely no modification to the underlying format, it doesn't matter. Microsoft will just support the open document format and the extensions. Even if it's extended, it would still be 100% compliant, in the same manner in which Kerberos was. One way support. This is how the embrace and extend works. It should be called copy and corrupt.
Microsoft is really good at killing competition by copying what they do, then adding extra bells and whistles. They can open up competitors documents, but the competitors can't open up theirs.
Sorry about the formatting, somebody doesn't like me in Slash-management and has bitch-slapped me or something. I can only post through ssh and lynx right now until they turn their teeth on the GNAA or something.
ODF will be assimilated.
Constitutionally Correct
There's no evidence that MS can honestly say anything. This isn't about opening and saving in OpenDocument XML format, it's about opening and saving in a format similar to OpenDocument XML that will eventually break when using OpenOffice or other not-MS Word software.
Why is it they can pull this same routine year after year and still have eager beavers saying, "Hey, yeah, it's going to be different this time!"?
Can you ever, ever point to a time when they turned out not to be pulling an embrace, extend, extinguish ploy while claiming interoperability? They've been doing this little tap dance for thirty years! Time to get the shit out of your head!
OASIS (the consortium behind OpenDocument) is doing its best to avoid licensing issues and legal arguments, which unfortunately seems to mean you can write whatever you want and call it OpenDocument, or at least "OpenDocument-based" or some other form of weasel words.
The fact that it's a plaintext format makes it easy to produce forms from other applications. Just find-and-replace substrings.
When I eventually get time, I want to add that functionality to my D&D City generator
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It isn't the "Open Office XML format". It's the OASIS Open Document Format. Microsoft is attempting to confuse the issue by deliberately confounding "Open Office" and Open Document".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Apparently, Microsoft has already denied this.
I got that on OSNews.com yesterday.
If you look at the source code, you'll see that it's a plugin that adds a "Import OpenOffice Document..." command to the File menu. It uses an XSLT transformation to convert the document into a a file Microsoft's patented/proprietary WordML document which is only supported in Office 2003 and then directs Word to open this file. Subsequent saves to the document would simply update the "temporary" WordML document (without prompting).
A real filter would add an SWX option to the normal Open dialog (and allow you to associate SWX with Word) and load the document directly into Word's document model. If the filter has write support, saves would automatically save back to the SWX. If the filter was import-only, saving would prompt the user to choose a document format to save into (where the user could select RTF or HTML or something that's portable). I haven't been able to find the docs on Words import filter API; however, it would make sense that MS would keep those proprietary.
I think we need to thank state of MA. Now Open office can flourish. Whether MS supports saving the documents in ODF format or not atleast they can read it. This helps open office usage. It would have been much nicer if they had put the support for older versions too.(I know why would they)
Think global, act loco
Reading http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510261 95537674 describes how the body responsible for advising UK schools on IT policies (BECTA) is planning to force schools to
"...use software that saves files in open formats (see pages 25 and 26).".
Following from this, it probably won't be long until government bodies follow suit in the UK, and the trend spreads from country to country.
Microsoft will then definitely be forced to support the OpenDocument standard, or someone will get very rich writing plugin to do so.
Office vs competition will then be down to features and useability rather than format tie-ins (Microsoft purposely tieing people to their products surely stems from a satanic Sales/Marketing department rather than evil developers).
If the competition comes down to UI/useability I think Star Office and OpenOffice are a long way behind MS Office, both tending to looki like cheap shareware applications at the moment. Which then leaves the doorway open for a company to take OpenOffice, pretty-fy it and sell it for a vastly reduced amount compared to Office (unless the license restricts this?)
Nothing costs nothing
So it won't be a native format of office then?
Why can't they INNOVATE themselves a filter? Because after walking through the Redmond courtyard, who knows how their shoes will taste.
*DrugCheese rants*
Embrace and Extend applies when they are playing catchup. In the office software space, MS is the dominant player. With the Massachusetts government mandating Open Document files, people would need software to exchange files with the MA gov. MS can't have people loading and trying out other software - especially free-beer software - they just may like it.
Finally, look at the license:
This isn't what I would call a BSD license. For an example of a BSD license, open ftp.exe (in C:\Windows\System32) and read the license as written by the University of California.
Think global, act loco
Thank you for your comments Mr Duke.
01/20/09
The description of the plugin suggests that it should be possible to port it to older Word versions too. Remember that Microsoft are retrofitting Word 12 XML support into older versions of Word (I'm not so sure about other apps, but I *think* the same is true for Excel and Powerpoint).
Given that, you just use the XSL to produce an Office 12 XML doc, then open that with the existing support, much like in Office 12. I imagine you'd probably get somewhat inferior results, but then one expects that when using an older version.
No text
But is it? Check out this article on ZDNet for a performance comparison of OpenOffice 2.0 and MS Office 2003. It seems legitimate since my own experience has been that OpenOffice is much much slower and resource intensive than the version of Microsoft Office 2003 I have.
Well, I recently upgraded to OO.org v2.0. I was thinking how cool it is that it saves in an XML format and how I could probably read through the XML and pick out info from the spreadsheet and writer documents in a text editor. Wrong! Its not all binary, but it definitely looks like a jumbled up mess to the untrained eye. I have faith that the documents are indeed open, but as far as human readable XML that it is not.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
A /. news involving both Microsoft and France? I predict a LOT of bashing in this thread !
The format its self is pretty compatible and hasn't changed that much since Office '97, and content seems to come across very reliability. The issue seems to be with formatting, especially complex formatting done by people who abuse Word to try to turn it into a page layout / DTP tool. These documents don't tend to make the transition from a newer version back to an older one at *all* well unless the user of the newer version is working in a mode that only gives them features from the older version, in which case it seems to be mostly fine.
Opening files from older versions in the newer versions seems very solid.
As for default printer, page size, and margins - "ARRRRGGGHHHH!". Word almost always defaults to US Letter no matter where the user is, and most users will never change this. They print to an inkjet that doesn't care; the most that'll happen is slightly off margins. Consequently, if you've got your system correctly set up and you use a network laser printer that _does_ care about paper sizes, working with 90% of Word users is a screaming nightmare of exploding documents and printer errors. Combine this with working for a newspaper where lots of clients seem to think that Word is a great tool for doing an ad layout to be printed in the paper, and you have a recipe for pure hell.
To say I was happy when I heard about Office 12's native PDF support (even though for Word it'll be barely adequate for our needs, being more focused on the sorts of things word SHOULD be used for) would be the understatement of the century.
People like having the crap they know than possibly having something that can save the world that they don't.
You send resumes out as DOC files? What the... why not PDF??
... they gonna use a fully *compatible* implementation of ODF?? *LOL* Then you really don't know microsoft at all...
As we all know (example: Java), microsoft never had problems "implementing" some non-ms-standards. But usually they just become *a bit* incompatible for no reason and then it becomes a ms-standard and the original creator has nothing to say anymore...
Maybe they get sued, but this does not change their behaviour because they achieve to even earn money from it. (You know what their "punishement" was for the java-case: Give some scools "free copies"* of windows and office. [read: hook kids to microsoft as soon as possible. earn the cash later.])
* to me this is a tautology, because a thing that is copyable without effort always is free by definition.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Then after a few people start announcing plugins and the OASIS thing starts to build some momentum, they approach a third party to do it? Are they not capable? They are one of the wealthiest companies in the world with a proven track record of delivering software of good quality.
Again, instead of supporting it, it will be some kind of 3rd party bolt-on, possibly with shoddy performance and maybe only doing a subset of the desired work. Probably at a substantial extra cost. They just blatently don't want to play ball with others, it's that simple. I'll place money on this, their OASIS support will be substandard and boardline unusable and they will finger the format for it rather than their lack of desire to allow for anyone else to coexist.
They did it with Office 2004 for Mac. On my dual g5, 4GiB of RAM, with most of adobe's type foundary installed (it's a design machine for my wife) it takes minutes to start up excel or word because it does this "font optimization" every time. I don't even know what it does, I think it might just be a dead loop because it sure as hell doesn't seem to improve font performance and it has nothing to do with what fonts are actually used by a document. None of the adobe apps seem to have that problem. OASIS support in office will be no different, you'll only be able to save spreadsheets with simple calculations (or maybe they'll just export it to text) and you'll only be able to use times roman or helvetica fonts in text docs; and it'll take 5 minutes to save or load something, with several extra clicks to actually do it ('Are you sure you want to save to this substandard format that lacks features?' 'Are you really really sure? You won't be able to undo changes you made 2 weeks ago' 'Are you still sure?' )
Maybe this will be one of the best things that happens, as Sun and Google put some energy in to openoffice and as 2.0 rolls out and support continues to build, I wouldn't be surprised to see some firefox like projects spin out. You get a lot of eyes on some of the performance stuff (which isn't that bad unless you really opening and shutting the app down a lot, it's quite usable) and I bet that stuff starts to get fixed. They start to get some collaboration built in to it and then there isn't anything that you'd get from office that you can't get for free, on most platforms.
The first "E" in "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is "Embrace". We are here.
--
$tar -xvf
Like all zealots you take a grain of truth and twist it into an extreme and utterly false premise. MS Word sometimes fails to properly display documents that where created with a prior version and that is a problem. MOST of the time for MOST documents the current version opens them and handles them properly. If your experience is different then you are in the minority of MS Office users. This constant, unwavering anti-Microsoft fanaticism of Slashdot is really getting tedious. How can you put that much energy into hating something as mundane as a software company. Seriously, you need to move on. It's gotten to the point where I can only stand to look at this site about twice a month and I can predict what I'll see before I get here. I've started going straight to the sources of the most interesting /. articles (cnet,dvorak,NASA,JPL,CNN, etc). I expect rants to get posted on Slashdot. What I don't understand is why the editors can't provide a better level of moderation so that the MS bashers can have their own forums while leaving a way for the rest of us to filter it out. You could create a moderation category just for MS bashing then the zealots could all set their filters to put the most outrageous rants right at the top of the main page and the rest of the world could just turn it off and read the serious discussions. Bingo, maximum readership, maximum ad revenue.
I'm no Microsoft apologist (check out my blog if you don't believe me), but whoever moderated this as Insightful, Informative, or Interesting should think long and hard.
I'm no friend of yours - you pick holes in someone else's English while yours is hardly perfect...
In that it's specifically designed to prevent "embrace, extend, extinguish" that M$ has done so "well" in the past - except for Java.
Is the ODF specifically written to prevent this attack? If not, it's now doomed.
And he doesn't sound like a buzzword-spouting, self-aggrandizing ass when he uses two-syllable words, or even longer.
"Leveraging" indeed. That's a hoot. Where's the fulcrum?
And I'm not surprised he's no friend of your's. There's probably a whole lot of people who fit into that category.
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format,
Microsoft is ALSO an Open Document committee member (and has been for many years). They've had ample opportunity to ensure that the OpenDocument format supports everything that they need it to.
Since OpenDocument has been painstakenly crafted as Extensionable XML, there should be no problem with Microsoft Extending the standard to add support for anything that is not currently included, provided they do so using Pure XML without any of the binary nuggets they've included in their own XML format. If they extend the format properly through the OpenDocument committee, then their updates can become part of the standard rather than being a fork (which definately would give Microsoft a lot of flak.)
Licensing on the ODF is actually very liberal and Sun, the only IP owner for anything related to the ODF, has already released an IP claims relating to the use of ODF. This is something they can't sue Microsoft over anymore.
--
Bob/Paul
This is a checklist item for Microsoft, to address problems like they are having in MA. It lets Microsoft zealots and people resistant to change in companies and the government buy MS Office even when there are regulations requiring support for open document formats. Microsoft has done the same with many other standards. For example, their POSIX support gets around POSIX requirements, but it is pretty much useless in practice. The fact that they are outsourcing this tells you how low priority it is for them--Microsoft almost never outsources anything that is of any importance to their business.
JAVA is much slower than MS Office. Here is how to fix this problem.
Open Open Office (heh, funny).
Tools / Options / Open Office.org (main options) / Java / DE-Select "Use Java Runtime Environment".
BAM. Now Open Office opens two to three times as fast.
You have been eaten by a Hurd of GNU.
Really? next time they'll be announcing support for this Internet thinghie...
The last WordPerfect holdouts are currently making conversion plans.
The only place you see WordPerfect these days is the giveaway bundles with new PCs.
----
Law firm IT manager until last week.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You need to print the entire EULA and christen every page of it with your own blood.
s'wut i sed.
Maybe it's just me, but, it seems like MS's trend seems to be to make targets out of people. OOo has been finding itself on more and more systems, in no small part due to it's near perfect support for MS Office documents (aka easier to switch over.) Until OOo came out and started getting so popular, only WordPerfect could truly compete (well, unless you go even further back to the very early days of Windows.) As one of my teachers was recently complaining about, one of MS's little tricks seemed to be such a seemingly small thing as suddenly switching their file extentions so that they would be the same thing. On the surface, .doc makes sense for a document, so it's definitely not against any rules or anything to name them that, but, when WordPerfect has been around since before MS even made Office and had been tending to use the .doc extention for that long, it causes something of a problem for people who suddenly no longer know which type of document they've got in front of them. In the end, it was Corel that changed the WP document extention to .wpd, not MS changing to, say, .wd or something. In the case of the business my teacher worked for at the time, the solution to the confusion was to force everyone in the business to use MS Word instead of WordPerfect. It seems to me like MS has decided that OOo has become too big of a thorn in their side and now the eye is turning their way. Now, don't get me wrong, they aren't going to try to kill off OOo, at least not directly, but, remember that, simply put their goal is to get people to switch over to MS Office and away from the competition (ESPECIALLY the free competition.) OOo is harder to fight since it's essentially becoming a standard and they'll never actually even try to kill it off directly or indirectly, but, doesn't it seem to anyone that this sort of thing is the kind of thing they do to get people able to switch from OOo to MS Office and whatever proprietary format they come up with next, but, to be a royal pain to switch from MS Office to OOo? Why else is it an "import filter" and not just simply another supported documentation format in the open box and save as?
Ok, I'm a MS basher and I'll admit it, but, I just can't help but find it suspicious.
Microsoft doesnt want OpenDocument, as, if adopted by everyone, it allows competition and may threaten their monopol. Also, as it is written by a commitee, they cannot simply add a new functionality when it would be usefull for them.
So they try to kill it, by anouncing publicly that they wont support it.
However, MS also cannot aford not to support it, should it really become a requirement by governement agencies. Therefor, MS has to be able to support it if they cannot kill it.
So they are playing poker : bluffing with the thread of non-support, developping support in secrecy and hoping that the governement wont believe those that call bluff. Looks like a clever (although unethical) strategy to me.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Microsoft shows signs of support after the article relating the amount of memory usage for processing the same data between OO.o 2.0 and Microsoft Office. MS hates to be outshown when it comes to bloated products and are rushing to defeat the competition in this matter. Undoubtedly with the new ODF support they will be able to increase RAM utilisation by a factor of 10.
Dig into the source package to: OpenOfficePluginLib/lib/ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.d
Look familiar? OK, the publishers say that, I would expect the presence of any GPL code, however "escape claused", might be another reason MS wants to keep its mouth shut about this...
The french web sites mainly says that the so-called "filter" is a XSL transformation with some .NET code to have a Word "plugin". Looking at the Sourceforge CVS, it's just a few XSL files and it doesn't even look good.
It's ridiculously simple technology and definitely not something that will change the editing world and have the next war be Word vs OpenOffice.
You all can write that (yes!), why is that you are all not on Slashdot news all the time?
Microsoft will embrace ODF. And monkeys fly out of my butt.
Well, so maybe they're making it pure XML now. That doesn't mean competitors can actually use it in their product. MS isn't charging money to integrate support (royalty free) but their license is very specific about who can legally use it and how.
That's pretend open.
--
You could BugMeNot, or you could just click. You decide
Liberal may also mean:
"Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor."
P.S. you're a moron.
P.S. I was being sarcastic.