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."

Comments

Re:Genuinely interested

[jmv]

There are many areas where OO.o is still lacking badly. One of them is the math editor. I still think writing a scientific document in MS Word (and not LaTeX) is a dumb idea in the first place, but OO.o is far worse than even MS Word. Support for sound (works but buggy) and video (inexistant AFAIK) in presentations is another example. These are "just" implementation issues (not ODF-related), they will need to be fixed if OO is to compete with MS Office at the feature level (I refuse to us MS Office because the format is closed, but not everyone care about that).

Re:So uh...

[qazwart]

the son of a respected Deal rabbi, is also vice president of the 300-plus student Deal Yeshiva

Oh, there are lots of features only found in MS Word that aren't in OpenOffice. These are things like their document wizard, VBA scripting, object insertion, watermarking, cross-referencing, index marking, and our favorite, Clippy the paperclip.

Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.

There are several reasons for all of these features: You've got one application that's trying to make sure that anyone who uses it can find the features they need. Because MS has hundreds of developers working full time on MS office, and they got to do something to justify their jobs. It looks good in ad copy (millions of features!). And, it is an important element of FUD. (If you switch to OpenOffice, there might be some feature not in OpenOffice that you will need.)

Re:KOffice also supports the ODF format

[Mateo_LeFou]

Yes. Microsoft's response to ODF has been a year-long version of that stupid dialog box that comes up and says "you are about to save in a text-only format. are you sure? you might, y'know lose some formatting or features or something"

I'd love to rewrite that dialog so that it says something like
"you are about to save in a text-only format. are you sure? if you do this, you will be able to access this information for the rest of your life, even if you don't continue to buy our software. Think about it very carefully, then press continue...