Slashdot Mirror
ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."
embrace and extend!!
Did Microsoft take the time to clarify exactly which features their Office suite offers that Open and Star offices don't?
Gosh, not that I'd like to insult the integrity of a company with such a spectacular record of interoperability and standards compliance as Microsoft, but I really just can't think of anything obvious that their closed document format offers beyond lack of compatibility with anything but their own products.
As groklaw has already reported there is a plugin for importing and exporting ODF files for MS Office all the way back to Office 97. It was recently finished and is in testing.
While we cannot and should not assume that Microsoft has OpenOffice's best interests at heart (of course they don't) this is still excellent news.
This is extremely significant news. What this means is that, after years and years of MSO having no competition, years after they basically wiped out wordperfect etc... There is now significant competition to Microsoft Office, and they are being forced to acknowledge it.
Hopefully this will mean that Microsoft will start developing some new revolutionary stuff in Microsoft Office instead of just resting on their laurels (sorry but I don't think any version since 6.0 has been that huge of an upgrade compared to going to 6.0). This is good news. We are all going to get better products instead of everyone just copying each other's minor features.
Open Office is here to stay. They have succesfully gotten a multi-billion dollar company to acknowledge them as a serious competitor just like Linux forced them to acknowledge that windows has competition. Microsoft no longer has the monopoly they did a few years ago.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
"Microsoft promise".. you're kidding, right? Since when has Microsoft ever kept a promise?
The sad part is that lots of people are going to believe they will.
I kind of remember it is about the lack of audio/video support in ODF.
I'm genuinely interested to know what features of Microsoft Word "most users use" that are not in OpenOffice or KOffice (which also does ODF).
Nearly all the users in our office are doing standard officey things in MS Office. None of them use features that aren't present in OpenOffice - in fact, hardly any of them use MS Office as anything more than a glorified typewriter with a handy spell checker.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Buy stock in chair companies. Else, take up plastering in Redmond, WA.
C|N>K
Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole.
My guess it may be from Word 2007 forward.. because why would they give ODF a leg up on WordXML? Even then, it'll be "OMG, you'll lose the formating of you don't save as Doc!!1!"
It's a trap!
Jonathan
http://www.justgofaster.com/
Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today."
OpenOffice has enough features and performance to satisfy my parents for their document needs at home, and that is primarily for work. I bet most people use their Microsoft Office for similar purposes. OpenOffice is good enough and the price is write, thus satisfying most of the Microsoft Office customers today.
It is more like Microsoft must provide ODF compatibility or the state government as well as local governments will not be buying Office. Notice that this promise came after they tried to bribe and threaten the state government to back down on its ODF requirement.
Failure to reverse the ODF decision means that no matter what decision Microsoft makes they will lose the Office monopoly. Bill Gates can choose to keep a piece of the action or lose everything.
Like an old castle, Microsoft is slowly being abandoned and crumbling away. Like the old castle, they will probably be around for another thousand years or so.
-- Cheers!
"RFI" is the common acronym for "Request for information" ?
God, I hate you americans with every cell of my biased european body.
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
On May 4th, slashdot covered the followup to this story. Now, three days later, they get around to mentioning the original story. I guess this doesn't actually qualify as a dupe, but it's definitely some sort of mutant nephew of a dupe, or something.
So it seems to be with office productivity. Microsoft says that ODF lacks the features of its higher end product, and "the majority" of its users would not find this acceptable. Even if this is true (a big "if") there is still a substantial minority of users who do not want to pay hundreds of dollars for all the bells and whistles. These people will rapidly migrate to ODF, especially once they can be certain of sending it to an Office user and have it look the same. From there ODF will rapidly migrate up-market.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
What more is to say? OpenOffice 2.0 and other offices are on par with commercial offerings. The only way commercial offerings can add value and compete for revenus is their "Live" backend services. That is the playing field now. Not the consumer / enterprise desktop only applications.
Lets use a real world example. Microsoft Word uses technologies like 'Ink' and as well as even voice structure, in addition to rich media formats
The two examples that you provide are probably used by 0.01% of Microsoft Word documents. I would not call them "real world" examples.
Not sure if you are using OpenOffice.org or not, but just in case you are (and for others out there concerned about version changes staying in sensitive documents):
Tools - Options - General - OpenOffice.org - Remove personal information on saving (tick it)
You can also go into File - Properties - General and then press the Delete user data button on any existing document to clear revisions, user data etc.
HTH
Visceral Psyche Films
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
No. About ten years ago I read an interview by a top executive from Microsoft (Nathan Myrwold, iirc) that most features do not come from customer requests, but from magazine comparisons. When someone wrote an article comparing different office suites they would include a table with tickmarks showing which features were included in each software. It became an obvious competitive advantage to have more tickmarks than the competition.
In that interview, Myrwold mentioned that MS-Word had over a thousand different commands, and that was a problem because most of those commands would never be used by the majority of users and it had a big impact on usability. That's how Clippy was born, it was an attempt to concilate the wants of marketing who insist on putting useless features with the needs of users who want to perform simple tasks most of the time.
Please don't even take my words on this, research it (on the MS side) and send email to Microsoft asking for them to give over ideas on how to fully support all the technologies MS Word and future documents might use.
What would be the point in us emailing them? Microsoft has its own representatives on the committees responsible for this standard, at least with respect to the OSI. I'm sure they would be welcome to participate elsewhere too. If they want to contribute their suggestions then there's nothing stopping them. How would me emailing them help? This is silly.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
And? Microsoft has put R+D money into Ink, voice etc, and would probably not want to piss that down the drain for the sake of ODF. But then, I bet Slashdot would jump on them again for removing useful reatures...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Beyond that, I can't say there's too much I've run into that I can do in Office but not OO.o . A lot of things are much smoother in Office, though
I think MS's argument is a lot weaker with regards to the file format, though I'm certainly no expert. I do expect that they'll be able to implement their own formats with better performance in Office than the ODF formats, but that's hardly surprising given that they designed them with that as one of their key goals.
More interestingly, the Office XML formats require implementing programs to preserve unrecognised valid markup from other namespaces. This lets you do things like embed (eg) an order record in an Office document, embed a JDF specification (when Publisher gets around to going XML as well), and so on. It's not exciting for the end user, but for developers and larger businesses it's a really nice thing to see. One could argue that Microsoft are getting XML "right" in a way that few have so far. Most interestingly by far, you can link the foreign markup in to your Office documents, so that (eg) a user can fill in a form in a document that's actually an XForm with your own structured data. Alternately, a newspaper could insert some custom metadata when exporting stories from a database, so it can tell what's been done with it, keep the DB up to date when the story is imported again, and so on. It's quite interesting stuff. Check out Brian Jones' weblog for some interesting use cases and discussion (and some persistent questions about the licensing issues from me).
The ODF spec only briefly refers to this issue at all. IIRC it permits apps to do this perservation, but does not require it or provide any facilities to support it. If apps aren't required to preserve your markup, then in my view it's not much darn good - it's somewhat like saying that apps may preserve your document text and structure. OpenOffice doesn't preserve foreign markup at all. If it's not directly in the ODF spec, you can't use it. This really loses one of the great advantages that XML has, and is very disappointing.
If we had a standard office document format that I could rely on having these features, there are some very interesting things I could do with it, especially at work. This fragementation and the ODF limitations are extremely frustrating, especially given that the ODF folks are always banging on the XML gong while missing one of the key abilities of XML entirely.
I think MS screwed up very badly at the start by attacking ODF with rhetoric and poorly thought out garbage, not a solid arguement over capabilities and other real issues. Insufficient audiovisual support indeed...
Personally I don't care much whether ODF or MS Office XML wins, so long as the resulting standard:
The issue with ODF as it's come up (and Massachussetts in particular) is that they wanted to be able to publish information for the public in a format that they could use regardless of several factors, the big two of which are choice of representation and futureproofing. As has been related many many times before, there are aspects of Microsoft's own Office formats that do not get imported - or get imported in a broken state - when opening documents in more current versions of Office than they were saved in. This is where future-proofing come in.
The idea is that the constituents of the Commonwealth should be able to read the digital documents produced by their government. It is FUD in the most classic sense that the idea was to mandate some ODF-only office suite that allowed people to work only in ODF. This is not the case. The point is accessibility for the final product.
Think of a magazine. Magazines are commonly laid out in Quark XPress (as a common example). Quark has features like revision control, graphics control, text kerning and leading and flow-control. Myriad tweakable parameters that allow the people who work on the magazine to make it look and read the way they feel is best. We as magazine readers do not need this functionality at all in order to read the magazine. We just want to be able to pick up the publication and flip through the pages and read stories, look at pictures, and so on. These are two completely different modes of interacting with the document that are not mutually exclusive, but that intersect in the act of publication. ODF is this simplified translation for uses that do not require things like XAML.
This is where Microsoft sought to sow seeds of doubt that the sky of document creation and workflow was falling. This is not the case, and what we read here is that what ODF proponents predicted has come true: Microsoft would not stand in the way of their users choosing to "Save As..." in the ODF format. It's just bad business for them to do so and I for one see this story as Microsoft acknowledging a big, fat "I told you so."
I don't even want to touch the accessibility/ADA aspects of embedded media, which is entirely uneccessary for the purposes that Massachussetts wants to use ODF for, but that Microsoft purported to be 110% necessary for anybody to create documents in the future. They were trying to embrace and extend their reach into the very act of creating a document. Is any government document dependent on the creator being able to publish their Inkitudes in a native format? I don't think so! The fact remains, however, that government employees can use whatever techniques they like to create a document, but if it's going to wind up being a public document then people need to be able to access it forevermore. I certainly didn't see them promising THAT in the runup to MA's decision to use ODF.
ODF is just another output format and there's no reason that the laws and other byproducts of governmental communication can't be published in a format that people can be confident can be incorporated into future products - it being an open and documented format - and won't be aged out in favor of Microsoft's decision that maybe Ink should be the lingua franca of Office formats (downsampled into Palatino if desired). Microsoft did not want to cede control of one iota of their Office franchise and they preferred to be able to hold the reins on just what software would be able to read a Microsoft Office document.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Well said. The biggest flaw in the ODF standard as its stands is that it doesn't really use XML's capabilities for, well, extensibility. There is no way in ODF to include your own data with your own schema (in a separate namespace) and have OO.o preserve that data, keep it with the appropraite document elements, delete it if the associated document elements are deleted, and so on. Let alone anything so interesting as interact with it or access it via plug-ins or extensions to add new capabilities.
The ODF spec gives almost no consideration to the perservation and manipulation of third party markup. OO.o currently just discards it silently when loading a document, and the saved copy omits any unrecognised markup.
The MS Office formats do offer all these features, and for that reason alone I'm starting to hope MS wins this one. Both formats seem like uninspring choices for different reasons, but at least the MS one won't artificially limit features and give the "universal" format the reputation of being limited, unreliable for more than basic uses, and crap.
I'm actually really interested in the new Office features for embedded third party markup and interaction with it via forms, etc. It has some interesting possibilities for use at work and with some other tools I'm involved with, and it's something I'd very much like to expore. If OO.o could support the same capabilities I'd be a very happy man, but I just don't see it happening.
You're kidding, right? MS office is the bloated one, when compared to OpenOffice.org?
Office might've been bloated once, and arguably still is, but it's nothing compared to the awe-inspiring bulk of OO.o in action.
"Ink" information can be stored in an ODF document using the Gif format as a metatdata container. This can be specified by using the Gif parameter of the Ink.Save Method.
From MSDN;
Gif
2
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Typical slashdolt logic: "I don't use it now, therefore it is useless and would never be useful in the future."
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
...
Why should they do anything about it? What logical reason can you think of for them to expend a bunch of effort re-doing what they've already done? Work, I might add, that benefits their competition and hurts them. Seriously; the the "market" for ODF is smaller than the market for storage of "ink" related technologies in Word documents
Gotta love that. MS say they will support OpenDoc? Makes a change from last year "Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format" - Sept 05 (ZDNet) Also a little confused about this line: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice". I thought OpenDoc was created by an open consortium of companies and was based on real world needs instead of an artificial construct to match the features of a particular program. Surely MS' doc format is the only one limited specifically to the features of a particular program? And last, a real doozy: "we will support interoperability with ODF documents ... and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization."
Hmm... so how come MS spent so much time & effort lobbying Mass. in an attempt to derail their attempts to implement OpenDocument?
Ink is just one example, but your solution even for that falls short of working.
... "This allows ink to be viewed in applications that are not ink-enabled and maintain its full ink fidelity when it returns to an ink-enabled application."
You say,
Here's the problem. Someone gives me a document with ink and associated content. I decide to use a "not ink-enabled" app to alter the document, and then pass the altered document to someone that views it with "an ink-enabled application". The document that I passed on is now "corrupt" in that the ink that was "preserved" is no longer consistent with the rest of the document's data, because the "not ink-enabled" app that I used to alter the document didn't have the ability to alter the ink accordingly.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Please wait while I wet myself laughing at your ignorance.
From your post I have extracted the following metadata:
Believe me, describing the ODF format as a "basic TEXT GOES HERE system" is like describing an immersive visualisation facility as a "computer display".
</flame>
Pirate Party UK
"Microsoft did not want to cede control of one iota of their Office franchise and they preferred to be able to hold the reins on just what software would be able to read a Microsoft Office document."
:-)
Is that why Office 2007's default formats will be open standards, recognized by ECMA, and later ISO?
Is that why the OpenXML developer's group already provides Java sample code that manipulates that file format without any need for Office 2007 being used?
Is that why a Novel dev is already working on a spreadsheet that uses that file format?
Read the following sites for enlightenment.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx
http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Seriously WHY does everyone think Open Office is so...... great. KOffice is way nicer. And has more applications.
I have to say I have used Open Office enough to know it's good enough, but I run into formating problems do to a very buggy user interface. seems like I'm constantly fighting with open office in the same way I have to fight with M$ Office in fact I have to fight with it more just to do what should be simple tasks.
Did I mention it takes too long to load and is slow to be responsive. I think it's assinine that if I want it to start in a respectable amount of time that I have to "preload it". I don't use KDE and koffice still loads faster than open office by 10 fold.
And koffice has one feature I've wanted in an office suite for a while now. TABS. I requested in in OOo 3.0 and they told me it wouldn't be implemented because they put it in a beta or some such version and people didn't use it so it won't make it in.
In which case the app you use is at fault, not the format.
And you'd be foolish to edit something in an app that doesn't support it!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
..be a better choice? Madobramedia uses it to great effect as the default format of Fireworks, and it retains all sorts of vector, layer, font/text and other metadata, whilst also resulting in something that can be viewed without it's metadata being understood e.g. in Finder/Explorer.
Allow me to quote from http://xml.openoffice.org/
OpenOffice.org XML file format: The OpenOffice.org XML file format is the native file format of OpenOffice.org 1.0. It has been replaced by the OASIS OpenDocument file format in OpenOffice.org 2.0.
OASIS OpenDocument file format: The OASIS OpenDocument file format is the native file format of OpenOffice.org 2.0. It is developed by a Technical Committee (TC) at OASIS. The OpenDocument format is based on the OpenOffice.org XML file format.
Read the above slowly until it sinks in. ODF is created with OO.o in mind. It was built with OO.o, OO.o's features, and even OO.o's code structure in mind. It's derived from OO.o's previous format.
Let's cut to the chase here. ODF was created so as to provide a way for MS Office competitors to compete, not on the basis of functionaity, but on the basis of, "Use us because we've opened up our format as a standard!". That's good, because it caused Microsoft to respond by opening up Office 2007's formats as a standard too (a move that OO.o and their allies didn't foresee).
So, neither side can honestly play the "use us because of our document formats" game.
Microsoft can't say, "You must use us because because we're the only ones that can understand our formats!" and OO.o (et al) can't say, "You should use us because our format is open and theirs isn't!"
They both have to compete on functionality/price.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
While your comment doesn't really deserve the dignity of a reply (especially since you posted AC), I'm going to waste some time and do so anyway.
The simplest reason to want to preserve your own markup is to integrate with other systems. Here's a simplistic example: A content management system may want to store the identity of a document in the document in such a way as that it can be reognised as the same document when re-imported into the CMS after someone's been working on it on some disconnected laptop. Existing metadata may not offer that facility.
Another good case is a plug-in that adds significant functionality to the application and needs to store its data in the document, have it travel with the document, and have its data associated with specific parts of the document. Consider a bibliography editor - if you delete the text with the reference, the editor needs to be able to tell that's happened and not output the associated reference in the full bibilography. Currently such tools maintain their own databases and/or use opaque blobs in the document for this, but these approaches aren't very good - in particular they mean that if the document is edited by a tool that doesn't have the bibliography editor, the information can be lost or damaged.
That's a simplistic example, but in the broader sense it comes down to wanting to be able to do things with a format beyond those that the original designers explicitly considered. Imagine if we still had to use X11 as it was written originally? What a mess. Thankfully, X11 is extensible and well designed so that additions the original designers didn't imagine can be added over time.
A generic, universal "office" document format needs to satisfy that requirement too.
"Wow (WW), this (THS) story (STR) has (HS) so (SO) many (MNY) acronyms (ACMS) that (THS) it's" (ITS)kinda "(JND) imposible" (IMPBL) to (T) read (RD) it (IT) "without (WTT) getting (GTNG) dizzy" (DZZ), dont (DNT) you "(YU) think (THK) so? (SO)"
//WR
I value interoperability much, much more than some newish Word processor features that few know about and almost no-one uses. Even if they're really useful, they can't possibly be moreso than enabling people to exchange documents independent of what word processing software they happen to be using.
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice
Micro$soft is lying through their nose. They know very well that KOffice, the Free & Open Source office suite that comes with the KDE desktop environment also supports the ODF format. In fact, they were publically informed about KOffice's capabilities last year in a open letter sent by the KOffice developers.
Yet they continue to spread the outright lie that only OpenOffice and its derivatives support the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF).
KOffice has a much cleaner architecture and a leaner codebase than OpenOffice, making its startup faster and facilitating the addition of new features. Because improving KOffice to meet the usability needs of governments, businesses and disabled individuals can be done with much less effort, KOffice is an even greater threat to Micro$oft.
Get computers and accessories from Linux-friendly manufacturers
I didn't say that, Microsoft did. It's a quote from their Tablet PC API documentation.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Nothing new or encouraging about this. Microsoft ruined html, Java, and so on by embedding non-standard features supported only by their software. They're well on the way to embedding Windows dependencies in Windows-generated Postscript and PDF files, too.
Transparent as it is, the strategy is remarkably effective. The masses blame the standards-compliant software for "not working", not Microsoft for having poisoned the standard. The courts will sit on their hands and a couple of billion-dollar buyouts will silence the commercial opposition.
Well, let's just go back to using Notepad then. I'm sure the functionality of Notepad is included in over 99.9% of Microsoft Office Word documents. The fact is, the features such as Ink and voice are there if necessary. I may have only used them once or twice, but they are there.
a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
... and you can take that to the bank.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
For any math stuff, you should use LaTeX or some frontend like LyX.
Word is a disaster, and MathType is awful. Wjy reproduce that garbage?
Maybe OO could use some LyX Matheditor code to create eps objects for equations. This is basically what I do with tgif, where I have nice eps equation images. Click on them, it opens Lyx to edit, save and close lyx and the equation is exported to ps, converted to eps, then uploaded into tgif again. Basically, tgif allows you to add the lyx file onto the eps image and some scripting for click action.
#!/usr/bin/perl /[A-Z]{3}/g) {
while () {
if (@acronyms = $_ =~
print "@acronyms\n";
}
}
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)
Let me start off by stating Im for the odf format. I think we need open formats. I hate to say it, but the plugin may be a bad idea. Why? Well in my mind FOSS helped Microsoft.
We gave the government a way to keep using M$ Office. We as tax payers are paying the license fees for the government. If the plugin hadn't been available, odf format was mandated, and MS Office was not capable. The government may have had to use cheaper or free software. Saving the tax payer money. Money that could then be spent on other things like roads, schools, parks, or other community projects.
Why would the government keep using M$ Office. A few reasons. First is the comfort factor. Its why bundling works, once you get someone to start using a program and they learn it, its hard to get them to change. Now the leaders do not have to listen to workers complain.
Second is dirty tricks. FOSS will play by the rules and point out the benefits of switching. But M$ will give large campaign contributions, kickbacks to purchasing agents, even provide paid for FUD studies that lie about the cost of ownership.
Is the plugin a win for free software? Not in my opinion. We all lost a chance to cause some real change and gave an easy out to people who keep spending our tax dollars like they grow on trees.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
You can insert video (as well as many other types of media).
Insert...
Plugins
Then just choose which type of media you're inserting.
I can't say I think it's very useful, but it can be done.
I dumped Word 8 years ago!!!
When I have to send someone a document I give them PDF.
My company uses OpenOffice and I advise my clients to do the same, but just telling them that their illegal copy of office can get them in to problems. I even hint that someone might just tell the police, and either they buy an Office License which costs a ridicolus amount or they install OpenOffice for free. I help them install, migrate and support the OpenOffice in their business, and I make real money out of it. You can do it too! This market is huge! Sure there are always those that prefer to continue being pirates, but you can always do that anoymous call and force them to license everything.
The only other guess is one of performance: *nix tetex is generally faster at typesetting than win32 miktex on a similar machine (and, if the *nix server is FASTER than your win32 workstations, the difference will be even greater).
That being said, it is hardly unusable on win32. The MikTeX developers are serious about what they do. If your colleagues have a legitimate gripe which doesn't involve a poor install, get them to file a bug report!
He did quote the "most people" part, and I doubt most people use the math editor or embed sound/video.
Remember they were discussing differences in file formats. ODF is no worse at storing equations than DOC. I have DOCs that I've converted to ODT in OO.o writer & equations are identical. (You did mention these were "implementation issues (by which you really mean INTERFACE issues," but it is worth emphasizing.)
Also: the equation editor that ships with Word is VERY bad. It is basically a limited shareware copy of MathType & will bug you to upgrade it whenever you use it. There are worse plugins that MathType, but then there are also plugin equation editors for OO.o.Can you clarify what you mean by "buggy?" Or at least give examples?I think this requrires Java, but I do know you can use video in OOo impress.
if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
Microsoft has spent more than 25 years developing its reputation as the business partner who will steal your ideas then stab you in the back and dump your carcass in the ditch as they continue their triumphant shamble down the Information Highway.
Microsoft has put more time, money, and effort into developing this reputation than they have put into developing any of their own home-grown, built from scratch, products. They fully deserve this reputation; they have truly earned it. Don't you dare water down their achievement with an indirect excuse.
These are not the poor little adorable kittens you would like us to think they are.
But with the ODF plugin, there's no retraining necessary and the government can continue to use their old copies of word. This is even cheaper than trying to switch everyone over to OpenOffice. Then when it comes time to upgrade their version of Word, they can either upgrade, which requires retraining, especially with the direction office 12 is taking, or choose to go with OpenOffice/KOffice, or any other tools available at the time that support ODF. The ODF plugin isn't about helping microsoft. It's about helping the break the Microsoft cycle, that forces them to buy MS Office year after year because of proprietary formats.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Please, please, PLEASE don't try and tell your co-workers to use an old typographic standard when every word processor they use has a feature to do that built right in.
Word's "Track Changes" feature is one of the few things that make it such a useful writing tool. Every version of MS Word since Office 95 has it, and they all allow you to customize what is seen and how it's seen. Don't want the balloons in XP-on? Do what I do and turn them off. Want to only see the changes from Director Bob, or ignore all changes from "Steve the Know it All"? You can do that, rather easily.
(For the curious, a few other things that make Word so useful are its Styles system -- when "Auto Create Styles" is turned off -- and the built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus as of the latest version.))
I'm not sure what you're talking about here, can you print out a Word document that demonstrates these features and snail-mail it to me ;-)
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Uh, exactly?
That's exactly his point: You'd still be stuck using MS products!!!
Thank you Mr. Insightful.
There are continued costs with using MS Office. Most of the licenses need to be paid for on a yearly basis with the government. As for retraining. Have you used Open Office? It is so close to to the current Word the retraining costs would be close to $0.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
I forgot to add, the odf format is about changing vendor lock in. But I think you and a lot of people confuse the format and plug in. The plugin by allowing the user to continue to use MS Office promotes the lockin because of the comfort factor. Getting users to stop using a program is harder than a lot of people think. Its why bundling works to M$ favor when they include software with Windowz. This isn't a problem when individuals or private companies/organizations want to continue to use M$ Office. But the state doing it is totally wrong. The state should have a mandate to use the most cost effective software to save the taxpayers money.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
How do you think Microsoft could embrace and entend the PDF file format? Wasn't Adobes PDF specification (or licensing thereof) specifically poisend to prevent exactly those tactics? I know, even Adobe embeds lots of multimedia with PDF (after its buyout of Macromedia probably even moreso..) and there is some embedded Javascript interpreter and whatnot already, but how could Microsoft be attempting to kill (bare textual) "Standard-PDF" with just a few extensions?
I'm guessing I still won't be able to open up open documents on a public computer, where I'd actually need it. Office needs to support ODF natively. And ODF documents have already "start[ed] to appear." What is that guy talking about?
Actually, when the ODF thing was starting in MA, Peter Quinn stated that one of the criteria an MS solution would have to meet would be an open, standardised development process that was NOT steered by one company. So, if they stick to that, embrace and extend would (should, asssuming it's written and enforced well) be impossible.
...once you save an ODF imported document into Word, that it saves it as .doc (as in "Word .doc", not "OO .doc" nor "ODF.doc").
I mean, until someone states OTW, I will continue to believe the same. Until there is an option in Word that says "ODF Format only", and then unhighlights all of the toolbars that are not ODF compatible, automatically.
Most of the licenses need to be paid for on a yearly basis with the government.
... curious.
Can you give a source for that, or am explanation? It seems
"The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization.
of course... if you'd tell Microsoft customers that word and excel aren't alternative databases, that problem would mostly go away.
if price is a problem, you could recommend postgresql... or mysql...
The two examples that you provide are probably used by 0.01% of Microsoft Word documents. I would not call them "real world" examples.
Ok, in your world maybe, there are millions of TabletPCs, and guess what they use these features. Both Ink and annotative voice are used by these people EVERYDAY.
This is not only about what is NOW, but the future as well. Vista and the next OSX have extensive INK support throughout the OSes.
So you think all this technology should just be IGNORED in ODF because you don't use it?
And if you don't think future technologies are important, how about other stuff like this...
Embedded OLE or OpenDoc objects
Audio
Video
Animations
Interactive Animations & Controls
Redaction features
Markup-Revision features
And the list of what IS in use today and NOT in ODF could go on and on.
How about even advanced handing of font kerning, that Open Office doesn't support, or how about 'character' justification, that is in use, and even MS Word doesn't support.
Should MS Word just throw away all the information then also when editing an ODF document?
It amazes me that people in the ODF camp would rather HURT users rather than try to make it something that has true support and longevity.
I am only asking for more serious thought, and not just a specification that is essentially ONLY support base technologies in Open Office.
folks, slashdot was not this guy's audience. didn't we just have a post on writing for engineering types? *know your audience*.
this guy's audience isn't the technically educated, it is the technically ignorant. they don't *know* they would be fine with open or koffice. microsoft tells them they won't be fine. most phbs will just tacitly agree and do all their normal job protection routine at work.
are you surprised microsoft is lying to keep marketshare? have you been a bubble for the entire existence of microsoft?
to paraphrase, "microsoft isn't the devil, but when they meet, they will speak the same language."
The ONLY time I ever embedded audio or video into a M$ Word or M$ Excel document was when I worked for the great satan. I have never found any practical use for that "feature" since then. If you want to build a presentation, use PowerPoint, not Microsoft Word. Word is simply the wrong tool for that kind of thing. Word is the ideal tool for writing a thesis, a letter, or even a short book. It is flat-out not a media application and allowing OLE to drop media into a document designed to be printed was done solely for marketing purpose (lookee here at I can do, Maw!) and no other reason.
Leaving the great satan was the biggest economic goof ever, by the way. I thought the dot coms were going to have a bigger payoff. I was wrong by a long shot.
the nice thing about capitalists is that they will sell you the rope for which to hang them with.
> object insertion
...You're right, OO doesn't have Clippy. It's got a talking paperclip...
> Same as [ms] office: You can insert objects from other OO applications
> and it works very well.
You can insert any COM/OLE/ActiveX object, same as MS Office, or a number of other types of objects: sounds, videos, Java applets...
> watermarking
> Not 100% sure about this one.
It's got it, at least in OO 2.0. Basically just like Word. View the header, insert the graphic, set the transparency.
> and our favorite, Clippy the paperclip.
>
Ick! It does? Damn. At least it seems to be turned -off- by default.
Actually, this is more commonly known as version control. It was around way before MS Office implemented it, and their implementation is pretty poor.
Sorry you thought I was trolling, I seriously wanted to know on what basis MIT adopted a format they had no idea how to migrate to. I could care less about ODF, OO, MS Office. It appears to be based on a political/idealogical decision rather than a business case and I wondered how it was felt to be appropriate.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Easy. PDF embeds Postscript and Postscript can do all kinds of nasty system-dependent stuff.
I'm with the sibling poster. I don't think most branches of government pay year-to-year. Most branches i've worked in were 2-3 versions behind current. I couldn't imagine them paying yearly for an out of date product. Even if some departments are paying yearly, then it still makes the transition easier. The departments that switch can switch without worrying about not being able to cooperate with those still using MS Office. It isn't even about stopping people from using MS Office. It's about letting people have a choice about which office suite they use, based on more than just whether it can read some proprietary format. Once all the word processors speak the same language people will be able to choose a word processor which fits their needs and budget. Currently, it's get MS Office, or risk not having your documents read by others. I still think that MS Office will continue to thrive, even if it adopts ODF on it's own, simply because it's a good word processor, people already know how to use it, and because people are familiar with the Microsoft name.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Presentations are not multimedia composition programs. Word processors are not desktop publishers. And neither are databases, especially versioned ones.
Honestly, can't people understand that tools shouldn't be built into eachother, and instead should have one clear purpose each? I use Wordpad along with Adobe InDesign for desktop publishing. LyX for maths. Flash for multimedia compositing. And I store it all with Subversion. It makes sense to me, at least.
I can attest that some things, such as language and accessibility support, should be global frameworks built into all applications. But that should be able to be managed at the graphical toolkit level, and not have to be supported by each application individually.
didn't say that, Microsoft did. It's a quote from their Tablet PC API documentation.
But the Microsoft 'quote' assumes the data will not be stripped away by another 'editor', the quote is talking about keeping ink in a 'viewable' only type of context.
Even if the applicaiton does hold the GIF and returns it preserving the ink, the INK that matches to the 'words' will NOW be different.
Ink is not only the gesture of writing, the strokes, the image, but also links to words that are recognized.
The Microsoft Quote is for keeping the 'Ink' in a documents, and letting it be viewed as a 'gif' and still re-openable by a Ink aware application.
When you open this document in an 'editor' the whole Ink structure is lost, even if the application preserves the embedded Gif data.
Understand? So the Microsoft quote is correct, but is pulled a bit out of context...
"...but I really just can't think of anything obvious that their closed document format offers beyond lack of compatibility with anything but their own products."
A really oppressive license?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today."
Actually most people I talk to that use Microsoft Office only use Word and only a small subset of its features. Most could get by fine just using Word pad.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Word has always barfed on me when I wrote anything longer than 30 pages. I have since moved on to LaTeX.
The context I was replying to was the GP poster claiming there is no standard way of including Ink metadata in ODF.
There is. It has flaws, one of which you have identified here, but it exists.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I would like to believe you're a troll, I really would.
The sad thing is I've met people IRL who would do exactly that sort of thing. Without exception, I would have no desire whatsoever to work with them. "Nice office suite you've got here... be a shame if anyone were to report you to the BSA" isn't professional work, it's extortion.
From the article:
This is just plain wrong, and is an example of the marketing machine creating a myth that most people will believe without challenging it. From my personal experience with dozens of people, you can put OpenOffice in front of them and they won't even be able to even tell the difference between OpenOffice and Word for most things they use it for.
Most people want to type a letter, do a little formatting, choose a few text styles, spellcheck it, and print it out. Most people get confused when they step outside this use case with the most trivial things, like headers and footers. Most people are not writing 150 page documents with 2 columns on a page, alternating between landscape and portrait pages, etc. Even if they are, they are struggling with Word to make it happen; I'd rather struggle with it, keep $495 per license in my IT budget, and know that the data is in a format I can DO something with outside of the tool that created it