Microsoft to Support ODF via Plug-In

Apache4857 writes "It appears that Microsoft has finally caved. BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft is sponsoring an open source project to enable conversion between Open XML in Office 2007 and OpenDocument formats. The project, hosted on Sourceforge.net, made its initial release today. The Word 2007 conversion utility is expected to ship ship by the end of 2006, and similarly conversion utilities for Excel and PowerPoint are expected early next year." See the announcement in Brian Jones' blog (Jones is the Microsoft program manager responsible for Office file formats).

Comments

Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

I bet it will be just as useful as PNG alpha channel in MSIE.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[bsharitt]

Just out of off topic curiosity, do PNGs work in IE7?

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Tribbin]

Microsoft is _sponsoring_ the development in open source.

Not exactly the same.

I for once have faith in what they are gonna do.

They might just hear people and governments saying 'we don't take it anymore'.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Bromskloss]

I bet it will be just as useful as PNG alpha channel in MSIE.

Or SVG... oh.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

They can just create enough caveats and special properties in the -internal- Office document structure that export to ODF will simply break the documents, or require painstakingly cautious convertion to some primitives. PNG IS supported in MSIE 6.0 fully, including alpha channel, but the implementation is so much pain in the neck for developers to implement in webpages, that they simply don't bother. (you need to create a style sheet including MSIE's 'filter' CSS extensions, and apply an 'alpha' filter to the image.)

Same can happen here - want to save ODF? Here's the microsoft way:

Pick "plugins" menu.
Open "plugin manager".
Open "active plugins tab".
Check checkbox by "ODF exporter plugin".
Click OK.
pick "export" menu.
click "export to plugin".
Are you sure you want to export the document to a plugin? Some document properties may be lost in the process." Click yes.
"Plugin export wizard".
"List of available plugins". Click ODF exporter.
Click next.
"What would you like to do with the file after export? Save to file, Send by Mail, Copy to Clipboard, Paste as new document" Pick "Save to file". Click Next.
"Where would you like to have the file saved?" - file selector. Pick file destination.
"Warning! Plugins contain 3rd party software which may append viruses and malware to your documents! Are you sure to proceed?" Click yes.
"The chosen plugin is covered by the following license:" (textarea - GNU). Do you agree? Pick "yes", click Next.
"MS Office is ready to export your document to a plugin. Click Finish to begin the export process." Click Finish.
A progressbar appears while the open source plugin actually processes the file. A moment later a requester "You have successfuly exported the document to a plugin. Click OK to return to MS Office."

Loading ODF document could look very similar.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[NickFitz]

Yes.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Tribbin]

Installation

Double click the MSI file to install the Add-in for Word 2007.

If installation is successful, you should see a new "ODF" entry in the "File" menu in Word 2007. It allows you to either import an ODF text file or export your current working document as an ODF text file (note that during development process, those functionalities might be temporary unavailable).

Important note: The ODF file opened by the add-in is converted into Office OpenXML (Office 2007 new file format) and imported into Word as a read-only file. If you want to save it as ODF, you have to use the "Export as ODF" button and provide a new file name (that can be the same as the current file name).

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Tribbin]

No you are wrong.

OpenOffice saves as ODF just fine. ;-)

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

Try writing equations that take up half a page in MS Word. Example with a simple one: z=sqrt(x^2+y^2)/2

Equations in MS Word: Click 'basic' tab. Click "=". Click box left from "=". Type "y". Click fraction icon. Click box above fraction line. Click root tab. Click root symbol. Click below the inserted root symbol. Click "basic" tab. Click "+". Click left to "+". Click "upper index". In respective boxes type "x" and "2". Click right to "+". Repeat with "y" and "2". Click below the fraction bar. Type "2".

Same thing in OOo: Click textual entry box. Type: "z = { sqrt{ {x^2}+{y^2} } over {2} }" Click on the document.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[zootm]

As much fun as comparing chalk to cheese is, some people prefer an equation editor where one does not have to learn a text syntax to use it, and some people prefer the efficiency of writing out in that text format. Parading one as "superior" to the other is an exercise in futility.

If you can do both in OOo (although I have OOo, I've never used the equation editor, preferring LaTeX, so I've no idea), that's a pretty neat feature. It's not a particularly huge one though, and not one which is particularly good for comparing the packages in general.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Tribbin]

OK, so which of these is easier now?

Re:Embrace and Extend

[PinkyDead]

It certainly sounds right - but I don't think that's the way it will pan out.

The whole ODF pressure that MS is experiencing is coming from Government level initiatives to avoid proprietary formats. Your average Government worker will be trained in this and follow the procedure in a totally mindless fashion.

However,
(1) Public bodies will think nothing of spending millions to test the ODF plug-ins and if Microsoft's offering doesn't match precisely the requirements it will get the boot - Microsoft money or not. Sneaky tricks like this might work for the insignificant individual with one PC and no voice - but when you have all the time in the world and a seemingly unlimited budget, no one is going to put their head on the block and sign off on something that doesn't work.
(2) The powers-that-be will want to know why a process has been established that requires complex decisions to be made at lower levels (append virus yes or no?), and why the process is so complex in the first place when cheaper options that comply fully with the original requirements are available.

Time will tell.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[joeljkp]

No, I think this issue is pretty clear-cut. Don't get me wrong, I think MSO is a lot better than OOo at a lot of things, but editing equations is not one of them, at least with the built-in editor.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[zootm]

Well, yes, but I'm not sure it's something you should use to judge the whole system, especially since for most users it's a pretty minor feature.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[aplusjimages]

Not that it matters. There are people still using IE 5 and below. IE is the web designers nightmare.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[h3st]

You can do both. When you start editing a formula, a toolbox and a text area appear. When you click something in the toolbox, the text area changes accordingly. Click the square root symbol and you get "sqrt ?" in the text area. It's nice, you learn the syntax easily and can resort to clicking for symbols when you don't know the word for something.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[zootm]

Neat. I'll check that out when I get home possibly maybe perhaps (we use Office here at my work).

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Atzanteol]

NG IS supported in MSIE 6.0 fully, including alpha channel, but the implementation is so much pain in the neck for developers to implement in webpages, that they simply don't bother.

That's a workaround for the fact that IE does *not* fully support PNG. Not to be confused with fully supporting PNG...

Re:Embrace and Extend

[DavidTC]

Your average Government worker will be trained in this and follow the procedure in a totally mindless fashion.

Or it will be like the POSIX fiasco. At a certain point in history, government purchased opererating systems were required to support POSIX, which is an actual independent standard that various Unixes created after Unix fragmented. The theory was, you could write to POSIX, and your stuff would compile on any Unix, which generally works in practice. So MS tacked some POSIX support onto Windows NT.

Of course, no one actually wrote any programs that used POSIX. The government would purchase NT boxes and write Win32 programs, not POSIX ones. They were just required to purchase POSIX operating systems, not actually use POSIX.

Likewise, I'm imagine the government require programs that support ODF, but everyone uses the Word format to save and transport files, thus completely defeating the purpose.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[drinkypoo]

That's why I don't even try to support it. Those people are such a small minority that I'm not willing to even try to deal with them. If they've got that old an IE, they'll probably get 0wned and buy a new computer soon enough, anyway.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Locutus]

top that off with the fact that 'their' plugin will only convert some future MSopen-XML file format to ODF and what you get is any requirement for ODF means you have to have the next version of MS Office( which will probably require a new OS ). So, if you have any existing MS Office files, you'll have to convert them to MSopen-XML and then convert that to ODF.

And Microsoft is claiming that they are doning this to make sure of an accurate conversion to ODF. Yeah, right. But rest assured, those who maintain use of Microsoft products, to point of exclusion to almost all other software, will use this and complain of the poor conversion. I wonder how much they'll pay the press to publish lies about the ability to use ODF in an MS Windows office.

LoB

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Spaceman40]

A couple things: You can do both in OOo, but you can also do both in MS Office.

The problem is that while they both have the functionality, the keyboard interface is better in OOo and the GUI interface is better in MS Office. Given the choice between the two, OOo is better if you're writing a paper with a lot of equations, and MS Office is better if you need the occasional math formatting.

Of course, LaTeX is better for any real writing that has to be done, but everyone forgets about that :)

Re:Embrace and Extend

[zootm]

Ah, nice. Cheers for the information. :)

Re:Embrace and Extend

[tsa]

I don't understand why MS can't just write the add-in themselves. I call this lazyness.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

You can do both in MS Office. The text entry is just disabled by default. And I spent about a hour in various menu options, preference dialogs and help pages that go bump in the night trying to find the option that enables this feature, but I miserably failed.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

no, no, no. MSIE FULLY supports PNG. Just the same way as 486SX FULLY supports floating point operations of 486DX. It is in there, the code exists, but the external hooks are either unavailable or broken or so obscure that you can't use them.

I've got the Black&White game off some warez site. I have it on the harddrive. Now if I only had the password for the RAR file :)

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

except that document had about a hundred of pictures besides that, and LaTeX sux at making a good mixed text-picture layout.
Either you go for fully-automatic layout which is great for books with equations, some figures and mostly uniform layout, and then LaTeX rules, or you start messing by making the layout fixed in places, attaching pics to paragraphs, corners and sides of pages, trying to keep a paragraph plus its related figure within a single page, and then LaTeX suddenly starts to suck a big time. Sure it -can- do this all. It's just very bad at it. If the paper was just text+equations, I'd go for LaTeX any day.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Lord Ender]

PNG IS supported in MSIE 6.0 fully, including alpha channel, but the implementation is so much pain in the neck for developers to implement in webpages, that they simply don't bother. (you need to create a style sheet including MSIE's 'filter' CSS extensions, and apply an 'alpha' filter to the image.)

If GIFs work fine with "img src=" and PNGs do not, it is not fully supported.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[howlingmadhowie]

no it wouldn't completely defeat the purpose. it would have the effect that no government agency could refuse to give someone a copy of a file in odt format which the agency already has in microsoft word format.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Or it will be like the POSIX fiasco.

Posix is a minor fiasco in and of itself, no input from Microsoft required.

The biggest problem that I have run into with posix is inconsistent implementations. For example, Sun does shared memory just differently enough from HP that even though the same code will compile cleanly on each system, it will only actually work on one of them unless you special case each OS (has to do with the specific implementation details of the namespace in a pseudo-filesystem that may or not be the same as the real filesystem).

These kinds of problems are inevitable given the way Posix was designed. In short, the posix committee was formed of representatives from all the unix vendors and for each piece of the standard they all fought it out to have their own implementation be the standard. Often the result was a compromise that left the nitty-gritty details undefined. This approach pleased the most vendors because it minimized the amount of changes they had to make to their own code to make it "posix compliant" - they basically got the check-list item for "free."

But any programmer who actually tried to use the posix APIs was screwed - either they developed for a single platform and just coded to that platform's idiosyncrasies without even realizing it, or they developed multi-platform and had to figure out the idiosyncrasies of each platform and account for it in their code. Thus making "posix conformance" a real headache. In many cases the non-posix APIs are more consistent than the posix equivalents (i.e. SysV shared mem "just works" on Solaris, AIX, HPUX and Linux).

Re:Embrace and Extend

[spectecjr]

Try writing equations that take up half a page in MS Word. Example with a simple one: z=sqrt(x^2+y^2)/2

Equations in MS Word: Click 'basic' tab. Click "=". Click box left from "=". Type "y". Click fraction icon. Click box above fraction line. Click root tab. Click root symbol. Click below the inserted root symbol. Click "basic" tab. Click "+". Click left to "+". Click "upper index". In respective boxes type "x" and "2". Click right to "+". Repeat with "y" and "2". Click below the fraction bar. Type "2".

Open the Microsoft Equation editor and type "z = \sqrt(x^2+y^2)/2"

Hey presto.

Not that hard, was it?

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

Not at all. I spent a hour looking for that editor. I failed. I bet this is a component you need to purchase separately.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[pbhj]

>>> PNG IS supported in MSIE 6.0 fully

Using proprietary filters that require specific treatment costing countless extra man hours of work and which cause a page to fail validation ... I don't call that support.

IE7 is looking promising though.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[DavidTC]

I didn't mean to imply that POSIX was a useful standard in the long run. If you were writting a very simple program, you could use it, but anything bigger and you'd either run into compatibility issues, or, more likely, wander off POSIX altogether, where, yeah, ironically you often had more compatiblity. It was, however, until MS removed it, possible to write a single somewhat complicated program that you could compile on any Unix and even Win NT, or at least port trivially between them with a few #ifdefs.(1)

I was just pointing out what's happened before when the government has 'required' an open standard...people have purchased things that in theory conform to it, and then not actually used it. Unless all (new) documents are required to be ODF format, we'll see exactly the same thing...people using and trading doc files, but it will be okay because the software purchased was 'ODF capable'.

1) Nowdays, all Unix compatiblity is done via people writing to somewhat fictional library standard, and then autoconf putting in missing functions, or wrapping functions, or including the right libs, that the root libc doesn't support. Which is a much more useful way to do things but not, I suppose, any sort of standard. Although you could make it one by defining a big list of all the functions and parameters you can use in writing a program, and then say 'either the OS's libc have these functions for use, or there should be a auto configuration utility we can use to do that'. Which is what we have now, although it's de facto list instead of de jure.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[spectecjr]

Not at all. I spent a hour looking for that editor. I failed. I bet this is a component you need to purchase separately.

You bet wrong. Just download the Beta.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

Ah, so it's in beta stage yet? Oh, I needed it about 3 years ago. Now I'm not going to switch to beta software if I have tried and true final versions that work, and did so 3 years ago too.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

No, no, no! You don't understand! It HAS full support. I also have a quad-CPU computer. One CPU is in plugged into the motherboard and three others are used as decoration of the case... You can't argue my computer doesn't have 4 processors, can you? :D

Importing, editing, then exporting an ODF file again in the new office may be just as much of a feat as getting my computer to perform computations using all of its CPUs.
(sounds like the documents get imported as "images", that is you can do with them about as much as with a JPEG in Word...)

Re:Embrace and Extend

[spectecjr]

Ah, so it's in beta stage yet? Oh, I needed it about 3 years ago. Now I'm not going to switch to beta software if I have tried and true final versions that work, and did so 3 years ago too.

So your criteria for whether or not Word can do something is "Must do it in the oldest version"?

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Vo0k]

Not "oldest". Just CURRENT, official release. I don't give a shit if it's in alpha, beta, pre-, whiteboard, head of developer or in a cargo ship in transport from Taiwan. If the production quality software available for purchase, or in case of free software, download from the 'stable' directory, doesn't have a feature, it can't claim it has it.

Corrected URL

[Rosyna]

The correct url is http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07/ 05/657510.aspx the link in the summary was missing the trailing x.

Excellent news

[Saunalainen]

Now governments can mandate all documents be in ODF format without being accused of abandoning their disabled constituency, and Microsoft will have to compete on its features and performance rather than vendor lock-in.

Re:Excellent news

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Yeah, it's very hard avoiding such accusations when you got a company like Microsoft around.

Re:Excellent news

[Krynus]

Unfortunately, that's not how it works in reality. Governments *might* mandate documents be in an open format, which Microsoft is (We made it XML! That's open, duh!). Nothing changes except it's slightly-less of a pain in the arse to deal with office documents now.

Everyone here needs understand: everything Microsoft does is about making more money. That's their responsibility to their stockholders. They have no reason whatsoever to expend above and beyond the baseline compatibility requirements.

I can assure you they won't care of ODF documents don't work quite right in Sharepoint.

Re:Excellent news

[ennadaiit]

This is good news for the present ODF tools since it gives them access to Office-07. And, this proves that MS acknowledges the significant presence of Office substitutes.

Another thing that bothers is - Does a system require Vista to run Office-07? If so, then I'd reckon it is a ploy to boost interest and sales for Vista. Vista has otherwise taken a lot of bashing for performing sluggishly and hogging memory.

That said, Viva Italia!!

Re:Excellent news

[nstlgc]

Another thing that bothers is - Does a system require Vista to run Office-07?
No, it will run just as well on Windows XP. Not sure about older versions of Windows...

Re:Excellent news

[DesertWolf0132]

Which leads me to the question, is there an Open Source replacement for SharePoint? Replacing that would allow better functionality from ODF I would assume.

Re:Excellent news

[CastrTroy]

Another good question is will we have to buy Office-07 to support ODF? It seems to me like the plugin will only work with Office-07. What about all the users of Office 97 onwards? Will they be stuck with not being able to read ODF documents, or not being able to convert their .doc files to ODF?

Re:Excellent news

[brufar]

I do believe the article covered that..

Another cool piece of this is that it will also work in older versions of Office. This is because the tools leverage the Open XML support, and we're providing free updates to previous versions of Office that allow them to read and write Open XML. It's another great benefit of leveraging the Open XML formats for the tool.

Re:Excellent news

[MMC Monster]

How about buying the new version of Office only for disabled people? Has to be cheaper (even at full cost) than a site liscence for an entire government.

Re:Excellent news

[CastrTroy]

This doesn't mean that someone with Office 97 will be able to convert their doc files to ODF. What it means is that they will be able to write their doc files to MS Open XML. How they will get those open XML files to ODF is another story.

Re:Excellent news

[slocan]

Everyone here needs understand: everything Microsoft does is about making more money. That's their responsibility to their stockholders.

What about Microsoft's responsibility toward their users? What about their responsibility towards society?

They must obey fair competition practices, at the least. And their users should expect and demand responsibility toward their needs, including decent and fair implmentation of specifications instead of obfuscatinglly stating that they implmented PNG support, or, who knows, ODF support, but haven't in a way that it can be used as expected and needed by anyone who actually wants to use it, at least as easily and strightforwardly as comparable features in MS Office.

Side note: I would expect to be able to save, open and edit ODF documents seamlessly. As well to be able to specify ODF as the default format for MS Office, as I can do with RTF.

They do have the responsibility to act honestly. And we should all demand it, instead of assuming and acting as if their only responsibility was toward their shareholders, to profit by whatever means. (As if shareholders don't care what kind of company they invest in, as long as it profits. Some don't, but others do hold ethics, fairness and honesty as a factor in their investment choices.)

They have no reason whatsoever to expend above and beyond the baseline compatibility requirements.

Therefore I say they do have a reason. And their users, shareholders and society in general should demand honesty and fairness instead of obfuscating and misleading statements and actions, i.e. implementations.

Re:Excellent news

[I'm Don Giovanni]

You completely miss the point.
Microsoft is providing OpenXML plugins for older versions of Office.
The OSS community, via the MS-sponsered project, will provide ODFOpenXML converters, for any version of Office that supports OpenXML, be that OpenXML support native or via the MS OpenXML plugin. Therefore the OSS community will be able to, if it wishes, make ODFOpenXML plugins for older versions of Office, which will work in those versions as long as they have MS's OpenXML plugin installed.

Re:Excellent news

[CastrTroy]

But how good will the ODFOpenXML converters be? Will they be as good as the Doc-ODF coverters we currently have? The Doc-ODF converters really aren't that good. They suffice such, that you can read the document, but not to preserve all the formatting.

Re:Excellent news

[Krynus]

What about Microsoft's responsibility toward their users? What about their responsibility towards society?

What responsibility? They have no responsibility to their users, only their paying customers and stockholders. Microsoft's responsibility to society is satisfied every April 15th.

They do have the responsibility to act honestly.

No they don't. You've obviously never negotiated an enterprise volume license agreement with Microsoft.

You're using the word "should" way too much.

Welcome to the real world.

Re:Excellent news

[JimDaGeek]

Microsoft's responsibility to society is satisfied every April 15th.

Are you referring to Microsoft paying taxes? Microsoft cheats society out even paying their fair share of taxes. Here is a /. article about it. Just Google and you will see how nasty a company Microsoft is and the junk they do to not pay a fair share of taxes. Bill Gates said Open Source was "un-American". I on the other hand think not paying a _fair_ share of taxes is what is really un-American.

People wonder why there is so much animosity toward Microsoft. For me it is not about their products or the majority of their hard working employees. It is Microsoft's never ending corporate greed and unethical actions. These actions are directed by the few "executives" at the top of the company. Replace them with decent executives (do they even exist?) and maybe in a generation or so, a lot the anti-Microsoft sentiment will decrease.

Re:Excellent news

[cyber-vandal]

They have a responsibility to obey the law too, otherwise they'd be selling crack and pimping ho's since even Office isn't as profitable as being a large scale multinational gangsta.

Re:Excellent news

[turbidostato]

"What about Microsoft's responsibility toward their users?"

Yes, what about? You have what's Microsoft's responsibility towards their users right there, in their products' CLUF. And amounts to a great heap of nothing.

"What about their responsibility towards society?"

Yes, what about? I bet Microsoft (as any other company in the world) will state their objectives in their foundation papers, and I bet nothing about "responsibility towards society" will be there too.

"They must obey fair competition practices, at the least"

Why they should? A company is a company, not a person. Only people can have something named "ethics". A company, at most, should obbey *legal* bounds, and taking into account companies' complete lacking of ethics, just to the point it makes economical sense to them. That's why is so important on an 'a priori' basis having laws that will insure that abbiding to law will make economical sense to a company. Currently big corporations have enough money (aka power) to insure law will abid to their interests, not the other way around (remember: a company should obbey *legal* bounds, not ethics).

"And their users should expect and demand responsibility..."

Ah... now you are talking (partially at least) about *people*, not corporations. Yes, people *do* have ethics, and probably yes, they *should* demand this or that but then, what if they *don't* demand it?

"They do have the responsibility to act honestly."

How can this be possible? Such a command is neither in that company's foundation papers nor in the agreement they reach with their users. They have the implicit responsibility to act *legally*, which may or may not be the same as honestly.

"instead of assuming and acting as if their only responsibility was toward their shareholders, to profit by whatever means"

Well, that's the whole and only "reason d'etre" for a company. That's our legal system; it gets to a point in the USA (so I've been said) that people in charge of such a company can be even legally liable if "profit by whatever means" goes down just to the second place. Maybe you would want (so would I) to be changed what the legal foundation for corporations are, but even then, since corporations are not people and so, they don't hold ethics, even in that New Arcadia, corporations still would hold *only* to their legal bounds.

"As if shareholders don't care what kind of company they invest in, as long as it profits. Some don't, but others do hold ethics..."

Isn't a motto for "Corporate America" that people vote with their money? Well, it seems that people already have voted with their money what they want from a corporation and that means *profit*. As soon as people put their money in "corporations with a(n ethic) style" you will see how fast they change. But in the meanwhile...

Re:Excellent news

[thopkins]

Actually not paying taxes is very American! Look at American history! i.e. Boston Tea party, the South resenting northern tariffs, etc. ;)

Re:Excellent news

[orasio]

Actually, they should be better, because OpenXML is, after all, a standard.
There are some specs to read. .DOC is a reverse-engineered binary, moving-target, format.

The fact is that, given enough effort (or money) it would be feasible to write a good OpenXML - ODF converter.
With .DOC, you never know, it's more of a trial and error procedure.

Re:Excellent news

[Krynus]

You've gotta be kidding.

Bill Gates was previously the wealthiest man on the planet. The international drug trade is small potatos compared to him.

We know how law applies to Microsoft. By the time the government decides it's illegal to force I.E. on people windows ME, windows 2000, and windows XP have hit the market.

Legislation cannot move as fast as their product cycle, ergo Microsoft need not worry about the law.

Doing pretty good until the end.

[khasim]

Microsoft notes that OpenDocument still has gaps that are being worked out by OASIS, such as spreadsheet formulas, macro support and support for accessibility options. Citing Open XML's accessibility features for disabled workers, file performance and support for integrating external XML data, Microsoft says ODF "focuses on more limited requirements."

"Accessibility options" and "disabled workers".

That's not the responsibility of the file format.

That's the responsibility of the app used to read/write that file format.

And with an Open standard for file formats, there's no reason that anyone could not write an app that did direct file-to-speech with no need for a visual display (as is currently the case).

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[mfaras]

OpenDocument still has gaps that are being worked out by OASIS

Do you mean Microsoft is going to work out the gaps for them? Like in MS-ODF ?
Hope not.

I don't like you embracing me and extending yourself over me, I'll call a working girl for that any time.

--
Being an independent programmer in a 3rd world country is no different than being a plumber

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[erroneus]

I've got a reason that "anyone" could not write such an app. I lack the skillz.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[cnettel]

Not necessarily. For example, PostScript is a very bad format for distributing documents that are to be consumed in any other way than as a graphical document. A naively created PDF can be quite bad, a properly annotated one not so bad. HOW you represent the data is relevant. I would imagine that most formats that are suitable for further editing in a structured manner should be quite good from an accessibility standpoint as well, but you can certainly choose to code things like text flow in a manner that makes a good UI, but where the semantics are lost. The app can only present and persist what's allowed in the format.

DISCLAIMER: This is general obvious facts. I don't recommend the current or future MS Office XML formats as any example of how things should be done.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[Frosty Piss]

And with an Open standard for file formats, there's no reason that anyone could not write an app that did direct file-to-speech with no need for a visual display (as is currently the case).

Hog wash. This is the same kind of nonsense that people spout with a variety of complex software problem... "if you don't like it, why don't you write a patch / plug-in / whatever". Why? Because I am not a C / C++ / Perl guru. You people know very well that the VAST majority of application users out there are not software developers, and do not posses the skill set to write complex code. So, yes, there are many reasons that anyone could not write an app that did direct file-to-speech with no need for a visual display. To deny this is elitist.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[19061969]

I think the OP meant that any company with reasonably skilled coders could do the job without having to license the MS Office specs from MS at an exhorbitant price. For example, a charity might be able to commission a simple screen-reader for people with visual impairments - not paying the extra licensing fees would make this cheaper.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[ArtDent]

You totally missed his point. He doesn't mean that you're less of a person because you can't write such an application. He means that there's nothing about the document format itself that prevents you or anyone else from doing so.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[MonsoonDawn]

And yet the lack of such an app is a major impediment to the adoption of ODF.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[Eideewt]

No shit. You know very well that he was referring to competent programmers when he said "anyone". Of course people like you with not interest in the exercise couldn't do it. But no one is stopping you from learning and writing it if you've got the itch.

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[nine-times]

Well, I'm not sure what kind of problems ODF is supposed to have with support of "accessibility options", but I don't agree that there shouldn't be any responsibility on the file format to consider these things. Valid strict XHTML, for example, requires an "alt" attribute for "img" tags. Now, they can be blank and therefore completely useless, but if this attribute didn't exist, any text in graphics would simply be unreadable to screen-readers.

File formats should be able to hold the information necessary for those files to be used with "accessibility" software. What are the complaints against ODF in this department? I have no idea, but someone might be able to educate us. Is it just FUD?

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[stuuf]

This comment makes a good point about how data formats and editors manage semantics, presentation, and accessibility. As an earlier comment said, accessibility functions don't belong in the file format itself. However, the "openness" of a format has nothing to do with how easy it is to write accessible applications based on it. File formats (and editing techniques) that concentrate more on structure and semantics rather than only presentation are better suited to accessibility. But even if the format is well designed, uneducated users and WYSIWYG interfaces make it difficult to write documents correctly. Modern HTML and LaTeX (to an extent) make it easier but the user is always the biggest factor.

Postscript is an open standard, and a very powerful language, but almost useless for editing or alternate display methods. PS documents are made of low level graphics instructions that are well suited to printers and on screen display, but not text-to-speech. Printers don't have to handle semantic information, so the language doesn't need any way to represent it.

HTML has had a particularly ugly history of going back and forth between emphasizing (in the specification but more importantly in popular use) semantic and presentation markup. In the early days, before graphical web browsers, there was no underlining, images, or yellow 24 point Comic Sans. Web pages were made of headings, emphasized passages, citations, lists and so on. Then in the mid 90s, when everyone had Netscape and a color monitor, authors started experimenting with adding more interesting presentation markup. Unfortunately, the language lacked an easy way to balance semantics and presentation, so web pages stopped telling you what they meant and only what they looked like. CSS solved a lot of the problems (or rather gave people the tools to solve them) but many took the easy way out and used old-style markup or a mix of CSS and table/font/etc elements, so the Internet is riddled with horribly inaccessible websites (not to say that there aren't people who know what they're doing and who will refuse to publish a site that doesn't pass W3C's markup/stylesheet validators).

Re:Doing pretty good until the end.

[odie_q]

"Accessibility options" and "disabled workers".
That's not the responsibility of the file format.
That's the responsibility of the app used to read/write that file format.

I work with preparing electronic text books for vision impaired and dyslexic students. We take ordinary text books and convert them into a format suitable for braille terminals, screen readers and other such devices. These books need much more detailed semantic markup than the what the originals have, as a lot of visual cues are lost. Our output file format (plain text with inline markup) differs quite a lot from standard word processing documents.

A well-designed word processing format could be automatically parsed and understood by non-graphical output systems as well as by those generating print output. I haven't looked much at ODF, so I don't know how good it is, but you do need to take these aspects into consideration during the file format design process to properly address them.

Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[moochfish]

Well, at least the project is open source so other developers can take it and run with it. This version is not what the PR people would like you to believe. Check out this doozy of a quote from the sourceforge forum:

"With the first release (0.1 - prototype), you can only convert documents from ODF to OpenXML. This can be done either with the Word Add-in (which requires both .NET Framewok 2.0 and Word 2007) or through the command line tool, which only requires .NET framework 2.0. "

( http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1 531122&forum_id=579283 )

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

The strangest aspect to me is the Open Document Foundation says they have a similar plug-in, but are very secretive about it and won't really give any details. Then MS just tosses on up on SourceForge for all to see. A bit of a role-reversal, but good for MS!

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[KarmaMB84]

Quit posting FUD. It's a prototype version 0.1.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[castle]

I sense a PR machine being retooled, or maybe listened to more frequently.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[Conley Index]

MS could not stand the fact that the plug-in of the Open Document Foundation was so secretive. Thus, they bought it and released it as Open Source...

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[Lord of Hyphens]

Why the hell does a command-line tool require .NET 2.0, especially if it's just parsing a text file? Other than the obvious insanities, of course.

Heck, if the thing (OpenXML) was properly documented, one could just write a perl script to do the job.
And as someone who's worked with the Office2003 XML formats...would it have killed them to have it tabbed out at all?

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[evil_Tak]

Why the hell does a command-line tool require .NET 2.0, especially if it's just parsing a text file? Other than the obvious insanities, of course.

Because .NET is a framework that includes command line capabilities as well as GUI? You *could* write a perl script to do it, but then it would require perl...

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[amliebsch]

Why the hell does a command-line tool require .NET 2.0, especially if it's just parsing a text file?

Uh...for the same reason that command line tools written in Java require a JRE?

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[I'm Don Giovanni]

The ODF version is probably garbage, that's why it's secret.
By garbage, I mean that it converts between ODF and OO.o's *guess* of the binary Office formats. (OO.o's support of Microsoft binary file format is not 100% correct, or anywhere near that, despite what OO.o's proponents claim; it's good for simple documents only).

The Microsoft-sponsered version converts between ODF and OpenXML, which are both open specs, so there's no guesswork needed.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[I'm Don Giovanni]

OpenXML is documented (ECMA draft 1.3 is available via a link in the same blog referenced by this thread's article).

And the command-line tool requires .NET 2.0 because it was written in .NET.
Java command-line tools require a JVM.
Perle command-line tools require the Perle runtime.
etc.

It's open source, so why don't you just make a C version and be done with it?

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[WhiteWolf666]

I have a feeling that ODF developed it with MS, under the condition that MS involvement would not be revealed unless the various governments agreed that it would allow Office 2006 to meet purchasing requirements.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[WhiteWolf666]

It's really not too silly.

Ever run a Python or Perl script without Python or Perl? What about the massive number of libraries that you average semi-complicated Linux command line tool requires?

Ever tried to do conversions involving postscript on your system without Ghostscript+variety of other graphics libraries installed?

My question is whether or not this tool will ever work on Mono. My guess is yes, that it will, given the tool is BSD licensed. This is a big step for Microsoft, I hope it works out well for them, and I hope it encourages MS to be more cooperative with open source.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[SanityInAnarchy]

No, it doesn't work with Mono, or at least no the Mono I have on my Powerbook:

eve:~/hacking/mono sanity$ mono OdfConverterTest.exe /I ~/Desktop/SampleHowToRMH3.odt /O test
Running with /Users/sanity/Desktop/SampleHowToRMH3.odt > test.docx

** (OdfConverterTest.exe:6641): WARNING **: Missing method System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform::Transform(Xml Reader,XsltArgumentList,XmlWriter,XmlResolver) in assembly /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/1.1.15 /lib/mono/gac/System.Xml/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089 /System.Xml.dll, referenced in assembly /Users/sanity/hacking/mono/OdfConverterLib.dll
An error occured during the process (Method not found: 'System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform.Transform'.)

Has anyone got this working?

This would actually be insanely useful if it did go the other way -- Word to OpenDocument. I'm being paid to write something which currently uses OpenOffice to do that, and OpenOffice on a server is quite slow...

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[killjoe]

Probably a pre-emptive embrace and extend. First they ignored it, now they are actively fighting.

And they also have a time machine!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the project home page:

In September 2006, Clever Age released an Open Source project that allowed to open OpenOffice.org documents (SXW files) in Word 2003.

September 2006, sure...

It was out love that did it!

[elrous0]

A spokesperson for Microsoft was quoted as saying "Well...we weren't going to do it at first. But then the gang over at /. asked us too, and we just can't say no to those guys after all the love they've shown us in the past."

-Eric

Re:its going to ship ship?

[smvp6459]

No, no, no. The project is going to ship a ship. It's like sending the QE2 via UPS.

Just one day after...

[Burz]

...SoftMaker's Dr. Martin Sommer states that an ODF plugin for MS Office would hinder acceptance of alternative office suites. Then all of a sudden, MS is throwing in their support for an independant project that had started a few weeks earlier.

Re:Just one day after...

[aquabat]

Man, I can't believe that ploy actually worked :).

Re:Just one day after...

[mopslik]

ODF plugin for MS Office would hinder acceptance of alternative office suites

Meh, so what? If this plugin truly enables us alternative-office-suite-users to have better compatibility with those who cling to MS Office, so be it. At least they'll be able to view/edit our documents with less headaches.

I'm more concerned about the file format (ODF) than the suite itself (OO.o, Abiword, etc.)

Re:Just one day after...

[Locutus]

except every other imported ODF word will be reversed because of a mismatch between ODF and MSopenXML. Well, that's what they'll say.

Sure it's on Sourceforge.net and we could 'fix' these issues but then again, we really don't think there'll be anything there which handles the 'patented' and 'proprietary' parts of the MS Office file formats( old or new ) do we? I hope not.

LoB

Re:Just one day after...

[mopslik]

except every other imported ODF word will be reversed because of a mismatch between ODF and MSopenXML.

Well sure, but right now if I send an ODF document to my buddy who only uses MS Office, he can't even open it. There's no filter to import ODF at all. I guess he could open it as a plain text file in the case of simple XML-based ODF files (then manually remove all excess codes and whatnot) but what to do when it's a ZIPped JAR with several content/formatting files? At least with this "converter" there's a fleeting chance he can get to the content, even if the tables are a little misaligned. Otherwise I need to send him the file as a DOC, or as a RTF, or some other intermediate file, defeating the whole purpose of ODF.

Of course it's not perfect, but it's a good step. Not everybody will jump ship from MS Office, so there has to be some method to establish and maintain compatibility with them.

Re:Just one day after...

[Locutus]

If "your buddy" only needs to read your document, then export to PDF and send him the PDF. Atleast that way, it's less likely your document will get changed and mis-interpreted from how you intended it AND everyone can read it.

But if you must send him/her an editable document, I would trust a 3rd pary plugin for MS Office over one backed by MSFT any day. There's alredy one being deliverd to that State of Massachusetts from the OpenDocument Foundation:
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingn ews.jhtml?articleId=187201009
But I don't know if it's been released to the public yet or not. And if people really think there'll be anything better in Microsofts plugin over the others, just think about how well Microsoft has supported competing products in the past. And if MSopen XML is really open, there's nothing stopping a 3rd party from doing as good a job, or better, than Microsoft since ODF is completely public.

And not everyone is going to jump on the ODF bandwagon right away. It'll first happen at the State, Local, and Federal levels of government since they are the ones creating public documents without owning or controlling the rights for access to the documents. The rest will follow this lead. And considering MSFT gets over 30% of its profits from MS Office, there's no reason to believe they will go quietly.

LoB

Isn't their XML format open anyway?

[astralbat]

Great! Now we can see conversions from open document format to XML as well. I think this is of more interest to governments that individuals - although I'd be using this myself and pushing ODF where I work.

Re:Isn't their XML format open anyway?

[mr_mischief]

ODF is XML. ODF is XML.

There, say it with me now...

ODF is XML. ODF is XML.

And when I want to use Open Source Software that reads Office files and saves them as ODF, well, I already do sue that.

Re:Isn't their XML format open anyway?

[astralbat]

I knew that. I made the mistake of missing "their" before the second instance of XML as I did in the title. I do not know much about Microsoft's format, so that was why I asked the question. Please try to be less patronizing in the future.

You may already use Open Office and I do to, but open formats on their own aren't going to convince my boss to go out of his way to establish it in the work place if it doesn't open in Microsoft's Office by default. Which is why this is good news for those of us who have apathetic bosses and also European governments who may have a long term agenda to get loose of Microsoft's products.

When the cat's away ...

[tinkertim]

The mice will play. Mysteriously, the blog link is a 404. I'm sure it was just a typo :) Kind of interesting timing, as Bill goes off to spend billions of someone else's dollars and now has to deal with packing as much as possible into PC's that will ship to developing countries .. all of a sudden an about face.

Not sure if this is him realizing just how difficult a lack of interoperability was making things in the real world, or his way of saying "Folks, I'm really (honestly) hands off now, see?"

So ... on the list of probably wont happen ... :

[21] hell freezes over
.
.
[24] MS Supporting ODF plug-in
.
.
[28] Cheney on TV without makeup

Well, progress, anyway.

What about existing versions of Office?

[DesertWolf0132]

So when does the conversion utility for versions of Office people actually have come out? I have yet to find anyone who already owns a version of Office that is looking to upgrade. There are no features in the newest versions worth the pricetag. They claim OpenXML is THE reason to upgrade but with Open Document being availible without the insane pricetag there has been no real reason to upgrade. I still run 2003 on my work systems (only because the retards here already had it when I was hired and no one wants to try OpenOffice.org) and I would LOVE to convert all of our documents so when I finally make the switch on everyone to OO it will be that much easier. Once more governments move to Open Document standards getting OO adopted here will be a snap.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[KarmaMB84]

If OpenXML is standardized like Microsoft wants, and there is still no accessibility capable ODF products available, MS Office could end up winning by default anywhere with accessibility laws on the books. That is exactly the reason governments are asking for ODF support. They want to use the ODF format, but want to use Microsoft Office to satisfy their legal obligations. They could end up using OpenXML and MS Office if OpenXML becomes a standard.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[DesertWolf0132]

The thing is, the accessibility features are actually a feature set of Windows, not Office. To test I just pulled up OO and then used Narrator from the Accessibility menu to read me some text I typed in. You lose none of the accessibility features with ODF as long as you use an OS with those features. There are better features out there than wht is included with Windows but those are from third parties and have nothing to do with Office.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[Kunta Kinte]

So when does the conversion utility for versions of Office people actually have come out?

Please read the article.

They say that an Open XML plugin will be available for older versions of Word, and that ODF export will work with it.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[DarkSarin]

I have an excellent reason for upgrading, and it is a feature which has not, from what I can tell, gotten much press: the extended size of MS Excel spreadsheets (hint: over 100,000 columns & 1,000,000 rows). I could have used this feature a while back, and would certainly love to have it for the future.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[MrCopilot]

They cover them too. FTFA:Another cool piece of this is that it will also work in older versions of Office. This is because the tools leverage the Open XML support, and we're providing free updates to previous versions of Office that allow them to read and write Open XML. It's another great benefit of leveraging the Open XML formats for the tool.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[Ryan Amos]

This is probably the most touted feature of Office 2007 I've heard of, and all it does is reinforce bad habits. For stuff this size you should be using a database. Seriously, spreadsheets of this size are not portable and are pretty much tied to the person who created them. Databases force you into somewhat better data layout and have a standard interface so that if the original designer is run over by a bus, the project can continue. You also get better controls over how your data is displayed and searched, plus the ability to integrate this data into a ton of different places without much extra effort later.

I can maybe understand in a lab setting where you need to do quick calcultions over a few hundred thousand data points. But you should still probably be using a database if you have over 100,000 rows of ANYTHING you're going to need to refer to later. MySQL is free and perfect for these kinds of applications, plus every kid going through a CS department these days has done a MySQL + PHP project.

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[PitaBred]

Who says that the spreadsheet ISN'T the interim format? 65,000 some odd rows really can be filled quite easily with very flat data. Which is what a spreadsheet is, a flat data file. If you're linking one spreadsheet to another, etc., then yes, use a database. But Excel is just sometimes the easiest way to work with the data you've got instead of having to code an SQL statement for each specific bit of data. We do data processing on a server, and it's easiest to test our transforms if we can just send it out of Excel, rather than having to set up a database, and then figure out an SQL statement that gets the data we want. And if we delete the data later... that's just more database admin stuff. It's easier for office lackeys to just use a file like they're used to. Get off your high horse. This is a good extension to Excel.

Or is 640K enough for you, too?

Re:What about existing versions of Office?

[DesertWolf0132]

Sorry, I just skimmed it and then got called away. That is cool though. Finally I will be able to move towards a Microsoft free office. The firewall is already Linux. The server will be soon. Next the desktops. And then the world...

Not as convenient as native support

[Raphael]

This add-in is certainly a step in the right direction. But opening and saving files with this add-in is not as convenient as if the format was supported natively.

Here is an example of the problems that the users will face when using it (from the project home page):

Important note: The ODF file opened by the add-in is converted into Office OpenXML (Office 2007 new file format) and imported into Word as a read-only file. If you want to save it as ODF, you have to use the "Export as ODF" button and provide a new file name (that can be the same as the current file name).

Basically, this add-in will encourage you to convert your ODF documents to OpenXML, but if you really insist and if you really want to save (sorry, export) as ODF, then it will let you do that as well. You will just have to re-type or re-select the file name.

Re:Not as convenient as native support

[amliebsch]

Yes, it's certainly not very polished. It's almost like it's a 0.1 Alpha release or something.

Re:Not as convenient as native support

[James McGuigan]

I think the idea is let govenments and large people wanting government contracts to tick the ODF checkbox, but in such a way that ODF doesn't become a defacto standard (as well as an ISO one).

I have a document, and want to send it to some random person who likely has MS word. So do I:

a. Send it as .doc which is old default standard
b. Send it as MS-XML and hope they have this years version of Word
c. Send it as ODF and include a half page set of instructions for how to download and install the ODF extension and open the file.

Being a geek who cares about these issues, I'd likely pick C, but I'm not everyone.

--
James

Re:Not as convenient as native support

[Lobais]

But then it is opensource, and it shouldn't take long to change.

Re:Demolition Man

[goonies]

...and we will finally find out what the three sea shells were for!

Caved? Hardly!

[andrewman327]

Microsoft has not caved as TFA says. Now they can compete in new markets where they were being gradually squeezed out. Now organizations can say that they support open standards while still using Microsoft Office. I am sure that they will do a half-hearted job of supporting ODF, and people will grow frustrated with how "limited" it is compared to the native XML file type. They will not realize that only Microsoft's implementation is limited. As a result they might start using the latter for things that are saved locally, undermining ODF efforts.

I've had it with Microsoft

[Live_in_Dayton]

If they do this, I'm not going to buy Office 2007. I don't want my office "productivity" suite cluttered up with a lot of extra options on how to do things. I want Microsoft to tell me! Long live .doc, the one true format.

Re:What good is it...

[GIL_Dude]

"There will be a menu item in the Office applications that will point people to the downloads for XPS, PDF, and now ODF" Looks like it won't be too hard to get if there is a menu item for it. People who want it can find it. And for the folks that are really asking for it (government, etc.) they can just put it in their image or their distribution of the Office install to make sure it is there.

why plugin

[Enquest]

Hmmm, seems the will make people install a plugin that will be hard to find. So home users still won't be able to see ODF documents and won't understand how to install the plugin. Microsoft still hates it that they are losing the battle... Well people they still could install OpenOffice.org.

Re:why plugin

[dave562]

So home users still won't be able to see ODF documents and won't understand how to install the plugin

What about PDF files? Are home users too stupid to figure out how to go download Acrobat Reader? Over the last few years I have seen PDF become a huge standard. Even small businesses that I'd have never anticipated wanting to create PDF documents suddenly want to create them because the people that they are dealing with prefer to accept the PDF files. I don't see anyone whining about a lack of native PDF support in Office. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite. Adobe is freaking out over Microsoft wanting to natively support the PDF format.

[troll]I really think that you guys are a bunch of whiners. Microsoft can't do any good as far as you're concerned. They want to support PDF and it's bad because it's anti-competitive. They come up with a system to patch security flaws and restrict it to people who have LEGITIMATE copies of their software, and you guys whine about WGA being intrusive. They make noise about supporting ODF and it's not good enough, because... Well boo hoo hoo hoo. I think most of you are wasting time simply to be different. If ODF and OO and Linux and all of the alternatives are better alternatives, they will succeed. If not, they will sink. You guys are trying to convince people to go to the best, when they already have "good enough". Good enough is good enough for a reason. Good enough would be great if people weren't spending so much time trying to break it. Luckily good enough is what it is and therefore there is money to be made in securing it and keeping it running. And what it comes down to is there isn't anything that Linux can do that Windows can't. Sure, Linux might do it better but like I said, better isn't a reason to scrap an entire deployment, and years and years of investment in hardware, software and USER TRAINING. Better isn't a reason to completely redevelop, and to spend time STANDING STILL RECREATING WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE. Like it or not, it's often more cost effective to work with what you have, rather than rebuild it from scratch.[/troll]

Having said all of that, alternatives are good. There are people who can't afford to spend the money to get what everyone else has, so it's good to have similar functionality available at a fraction of the cost.

Obligatory Russian Reverse

[gnarlin]

In Soviet Russia Microsoft suppor.... Oh, wait!?

Hipocratica

[orbitor]

I don't usually jump on this band wagon, but this statement:

Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing

just adds to the idea that all of these people are so brain washed that they are actually doing something that will benefit users, that they can not but help spouting the virtues of the company line at every opportunity.

I would appreciate someone just being honest with themselves for a change. Something like "That brouhaha in Massachusetts gave us a scare and we think that we had better support this ODF format or we might loose alot of government business. Geez, an open file format, why didn't we think of that?"

Re:Hipocratica

[brufar]

Aww comeon.. MS has never had to change the text document format. it's always been the same.. 100% compatible across every version of MS works and MS office.. [/sarcasm]

Re:Hipocratica

[TheNetAvenger]

Geez, an open file format, why didn't we think of that

Um... They did think of that, except the MS proposed Open Document format supports things outside of basic text and fonts. Stuff for disabled people, ink, media, etc...

But in the end the Open Document Geeks win round one and the standard everyone gets is like RTF of 1993...

The Open Source World is SO brilliant sometimes. If they were jumping out of a plane they would take the towel labeled 'Open Source' parachute, just because the real parachute had a Microsoft logo on it.

Stuff like this makes me embarrassed for my friends in the Open Source world. The Open Document standard is a scam, and just because the people behind it slapped 'open source standard' on it, everyone here just blindly accepts it and assumes it is the best. Sad...

Taking bets...

[dbarclay10]

Okay, I'm taking bets on them doing this as part of a typical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Extort" cycle. I give 2:1 odds on Microsoft producing ODF documents that just don't work right, or are horribly buggy. The import will lose all sorts of formatting and similar such things.

Anybody? :)

Re:Taking bets...

[amliebsch]

Well, since the project is BSD licensed, what's to stop you from fixing it?

Re:Taking bets...

[Qubit]

Well, since the project is BSD licensed, what's to stop you from fixing it?

For one, are they going to accept bugfixes? I'm going to guess that even if companies or governmental departments use this software, they will only use the "official" version. If outside developers' patches are generally denied, then this plugin could put people off from using ODF, which is the last thing we want to have happen...

Re:Taking bets...

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

For one, are they going to accept bugfixes?

Have you never heard of a fork?
You could call it "The One True ODF Converter" if you wanted to distinguish it.

Re:Taking bets...

[mattpalmer1086]

Nah - I think they will support the standard reasonably well. But of course, there will be "advanced" functionality that doesn't map to the feature set of the office applications, so that will be lost when you convert between them.

Government do have plans to use it at some point though. Why should every citizen have to pay a microsoft tax (e.g. buy a copy of Microsoft office) in order to read documents produced by their own government? ODF was already being looked at as an archival format for digital documentation. It's great the MS Office will be able to read and write ODF files.

The thing that is maybe not appreciated by all, is that, while government have been producing documents digitally for decades, just like the rest of us, those electronic copies weren't regarded as the actual document - it was the final print-out that was the document - the computer was just the means of production. It's only very, very recently that the (UK) government has decreed that the actual document (ie. the one that eventually might be archived) is really the digital copy.

Re:Taking bets...

[meowmee]

perhaps the oasis committee should take up the job (charging some admin fees to keep it viable) of certifying applications that are odf compliant. only those who pass get's a odf logo. that way m$ won't be able do the "embrace and extend" trick. maybe this should have been done for html and css too!

Re:Taking bets...

[Locutus]

Well, since the project is BSD licensed, what's to stop you from fixing it?

And what would be the purpose of doing that? You know darn well that ODF format/structures will not be translated to the same proprietary format/structures of MSopen XML.

This 'plug-in' is only going go convert from ODF to MSopen XML initially and supposedly, it'll eventually go the other way. If you'd like to convert your existing proprietary formatted MS-word document formats then you'll have to move them to MSopen XML first and THEN to ODF. And if you want MSopen XML then you'll have to get a future version of MS Office( 2007 ) and it's likely you'll also need another version of Microsoft Windows to run that, and you'll probably need a new computer to run that.

So good luck trying to fix any of this without reverse engineering Microsofts patented structures, purchasing all that new software, and hardware to do this and still be doing this with possible legal threats from MSFT. And then, you'd be doing this when the whole purpose of this Microsoft plugin is not to provide something that'll be useful but instead, to provide something to show how bad ODF is.

Good luck with THAT.

LoB

Re:Taking bets...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. This was modded Insightful? Who wasted mod points on that?

MS has already stated publicly on their web site that they are making OpenXML available to the world at large for free. They've also started the standardization process with ECMA. See http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/itpro/ecma faq.mspx. So there is no "proprietary format/structures of MSopen XML."

"f you'd like to convert your existing proprietary formatted MS-word document formats then you'll have to move them to MSopen XML first and THEN to ODF"

Wrong. Try reading the blog that was linked in the post. Here is what it says: "There will be a menu item in the Office applications that will point people to the downloads for XPS, PDF, and now ODF. So you'll have the ability to save to and open ODF files directly within Office (just like any other format)."

"And if you want MSopen XML then you'll have to get a future version of MS Office( 2007 ) and it's likely you'll also need another version of Microsoft Windows to run that, and you'll probably need a new computer to run that."

Wrong again. MS is already working on OpenXML native import/save/open for Office 2003, XP, and 2000. Also, Office 2007 is spec'd for something like WinXP SP2 and higher. Of course if you're still on Win98 you won't be able to load Office 2007 but if you are still on Win98 you should move to an OS that isn't 8 years old.

"So good luck trying to fix any of this without reverse engineering Microsofts patented structures, purchasing all that new software, and hardware to do this and still be doing this with possible legal threats from MSFT."

Wrong, wrong wrong. Try learning something about what you're posting isntead of having the standard /. knee-jerk reaction.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Re:Taking bets...

[jason ward]

Them suing you for violating the patents and copyrights and other ip they hold on their file format.

Re:Taking bets...

[amliebsch]

Government do have plans to use it at some point though. Why should every citizen have to pay a microsoft tax (e.g. buy a copy of Microsoft office) in order to read documents produced by their own government?

That's a lame argument for three reasons.

Microsoft provides free Office document viewers for this very reason.

Re:Taking bets...

[mattpalmer1086]

A very good point. Of course, the nice thing about ODF (or any open, standardised format) is that it's possible for anyone to produce a viewer on any platform, if the need arises. If Microsoft could have successfully played the available-viewers-for-proprietary-formats argument, they wouldn't have gone down this route.

I work in digital preservation for the UK government, and it's something we've been monitoring with interest for a while. We were basically considering migrating all office formats into their ODF equivalents, to maximise the preservation and dissemination opportunities for archived government documents. Now that Microsoft are going to support the ODF format, the risk in keeping office documents in their native formats has actually gone down! A sensible move by Microsoft, which I expect to pay off for everyone.

Re:Taking bets...

[Locutus]

wow, there's so much wrong with your reply I don't know where to start. Let's start with the ECMA, they allow proprietary/patented material in their 'standards' and Microsoft has this in their MS OpenXML. And that FAQ link was just too funny. I loved the question: "How open or closed will the Ecma International process be for the OpenXML formats?". Shouldn't that have been 'How open or closed with the Ecma standard be for the MS OpenXML formats'? Oh, and Microsoft has been 'talking' about open standard for over 6 years now and yet, none of it is really open. They use the work "open" alot though.

Next, where do you get that a menu item to download a plugin means the conversion is right to ODF? And I could be wrong with regards to other versions of MS Office working with this but surely stating that Microsoft is working on MS OpenXML capabilities for some previous version of MS Office does not mean this plugin will work with it. It goes more to say that converting to MS OpenXML is going to be a requirement before converting to ODF.

over 20 years of Microsoft history tells me that what they SAY and what they DO are VERY different unless you look at what they SAY from a marketing perspective. Then, when the resulting product is thrown out there, you'll not be surprised. IMO

LoB

Re:Taking bets...

[killjoe]

1) Ecma standards are worthless. Ecma exists specifically for the purposes of ratifying standards that have patent encumeberences. In other words standards that are not usable by open source.
2) MS does have patents on their file formats (and on XML in general). Unless they specifically state otherwise you should assume they will sue you.

Re:Taking bets...

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Microsoft provides free Office document viewers for this very reason.

Good - where can I download a Linux version ?

Oh - I can't ? Then they are useless for me.

Use the Source

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bollocks. The translator is BSD licensed, you just go there and fix it if necessary.

Why is this important?

[Noryungi]

Several reasons:

1. Microsoft has finally realized it cannot fight against the Linux trend. Even if Linux is not ready for the desktop -- which is debatable -- free [beer|speech] software is now good enough to replace at least part of Windows and/or Office on the desktop.
   
2. Microsoft now openly acknowledges -- through this decision -- that they don't control the market, but that they are forced to bow to the pressure of their clients. This is pretty much unprecedented, as Microsoft, through FUD and VaporWare, used to control its clients, and not the other way around.

All in all, this is very good news for Open Source, and a chink in the mighty Microsoft FUD machine...

Re:Why is this important?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Your first point is stupid, as this has nothing to do with Linux.

As for your second point, you say that Microsoft openly acknowledges that "they don't control the market, but that they are forced to bow to the pressure of their clients."
(BTW, this has been the case for years, but you've refused to admit it. Microsoft has always maintained this position.)

But let's get to my point:
Those of your ilk have been whining about how abusive Microsoft is because they *do* control the market.
Which is it?

If Microsoft doesn't control the market, which you and Microsoft openly acknowledge, then you'll shut up about the supposed abuse? Somehow, I doubt it.

When it serves your anti-MS propaganda purposes, you'll shout about how Microsoft does control the market and needs big government to bring them down. And when it serves your purpose to proclaim that Microsoft does NOT control the market, you'll do that too. Typical slashdot-thinking.

Top Execs Leave?

[neonprimetime]

Is it just a coincidence that MSFT joins the Open Source community and adopts ODF after some of their top execs say they're leaving? Perhaps there was a movement within that these top execs didn't like?

Re:Top Execs Leave?

[tashanna]

Ok, I'll bite. I'm sure there's some other executives thinking "Hey, Gates was against it, but since he's leaving in two years , we should go ahead - we're safe now". Likewise, I'm sure Taylor was a chest-thumping anti-FOSS advocate. This was soundly reinforced by his defection to Google.</sarcasm>

- Tash

Clarifications

[The MAZZTer]

It's a plugin for Word, it's not a separate conversion utility as the article implies.

It can't handle manual page breaks it seems. Once I get OpenOffice.org on here to verify, I'm submitting their first bug report. :)

The default install directory seems to indicate this is a third-party tool, not an MS tool.

It doesn't add file types to the default Open/Save dialogs (the ideal solution). Instead, you import and export the files with their own dialogs. This also means hitting File/Save when you have an ODF file open will open up a save as dialog fro DOCX only.

Re:Clarifications

[SCHecklerX]

I just wish OO.o 2 would open my OO.o 1 files. I had to uninstall and then reinstall the older version. I expect this from M$, but from Open Office?

I remain a bit more optimistic

[erroneus]

While other people repeat the "embrace, extent, extinguish, extort, exume" prophecy, I see reasons not to make that assumption about Microsoft.

For one, it has received a lot of attention in the mainstream press about delays in delivery of Vista and the next release of Office. Further, there has been a lot of significant changes in the heirarchy of Microsoft. Couple that with their loosing streak against political and business pressures, suggests that they should change and adapt or face catastrophy.

They CAN compete on the basis of merit. Many of their people still remember how and those who can't could be quickly replaced with fresh blood I'm sure. And the momentum is still in Microsoft's favor. If it means admins across the world have to roll out plugins instead of new office suites, which do you think they would be more inclined to do?

Now will Microsoft break the standard in some way they way they perist in doing with CSS? It remains to be seen, but it's an open source project so I'm doubting it... "the people" won't stand for anything less than perfect and will keep workin in that direction.

Less fear on this one

[John Jamieson]

Since it will be an open source project on Source Forge, I am not very fearfull about some big plot to embrace, extend and Extinguish(it can be forked or whatever). I think MS really needs this plug in to gain sales in the long term. There are many places that will adopt ODF where there will be individuals and departments that are MS fans. Now they can come up with some reason that they have to have MS Office and cut the cheque themselves.

Here at work I am encouraging the switch to ODF, and plugin's like this will allow MS to keep playing for all our desktops, even if we switch to ODF.

Re:Less fear on this one

[awkScooby]

Since it will be an open source project on Source Forge, I am not very fearfull about some big plot to embrace, extend and Extinguish(it can be forked or whatever).

Are you positive it can be forked? Doesn't Microsoft have patents on their XML format, which they've licensed under terms that are incompatible with open source projects? From what I recall, you aren't allowed to re-distrubute without explicit permission from Microsoft. So, you can't fork unless you get their permission first.

Re:Less fear on this one

[John Jamieson]

Good solid point. The whole patent thing is lurking in the shadows for this and any open source software.

If the project was accepted by source forge, would it not have to be under an acceptable licence (one that allows for re-distrubution/forking)?

Re:Microsoft at it again -

[Ant P.]

You might have a point
You made one small mistake though
Should be 5-7-5

Embrace and Extend. Exactly, and co-opt!

[mollog]

In a pig's eye, they've caved! They'll corrupt the specification is what will happen.

Don't expect Microsoft to ever, not ever, cooperate. Expect them to corrupt the 'specification'.

Re:Embrace and Extend. Exactly, and co-opt!

[plague3106]

So the open source developers will corrupt the specification?

Too late! Support for older Office suites?

[Werrismys]

We need this plugin for Office 2000, XP etc too. No-one is going to upgrade to 2007's DRM hell to read ODF.

Re:Too late! Support for older Office suites?

[swimin]

You don't actually need any version of office to make the command line utility work.

it's not "our" fault

[stoove]

In my eyes the move here is to lift a weight of the developers at Microsoft. And if something goes wrong it is still possible to arrange the arguments in a way that they don't come back to MS.

Re:Caved? Hardly!

[2starr]

Exactly. The idea is to be able to fulfill a checkbox item. Now they can say they support open formats so customers feel all warm and fuzzy. Why in a plugin if they're going to do it anyway? Because people just expect plugins to be flakier. So, when it doesn't fully work, you just blame the plugin. So, customers stick with native Word format because it works better but feel all warm and fuzzy inside because they (think they) could use ODF if they wanted to.

Re:What good is it...

[mario64]

But most people will just stick with the standard that Microsoft as default. Once enough people are using their standard it will become THE standard (they hope).

For a full in-depth article on the announcment see Groklaw
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200607060 64747376

Everybody thinks it's so great..

[guruevi]

but what they are actually are going to do is create a broken implementation of ODF and then point and say: see see see, while some OSS developer is going to create another plugin that does it all perfectly but breaks with every Office update. They are going to be sued for some pennies for not opening up their documentation and maintaining their monopoly. We've seen it over and over again with HTML, Java, Novell and it's going to happen again.

BTW: their current conversion tool doesn't work for certain features (manual page break) which is NOT a compatibility issue. It's obviously broken by design.

I for one am not impressed and do NOT welcome our ODF-importing overlords.

Re:Everybody thinks it's so great..

[morganew]

Wow, I think your tinfoil hat is on a little to tight.

To say "they are going to create an broken implmentation" is silly. They don't control sourceforge, and the tool is released under the BSD license. So essentally they don't control any element of it.

This is a 'duh' story - essentally Microsoft put some money into a project that converts from one OPEN standard to another OPEN standard. It's not like they gave up any secret sauce.

If you want to make sure that the "page break" problem is solved, get yourself to sourceforge and add some code to the project!

Microsoft can't afford to not play the Game...

[celotil]

Microsoft will do whatever it takes to stay in the Game, and they'll cheat, lie and steal to stay on top of the Game - a.l.a. embrace, extend, and extinguish.

If you don't know what the Game is, then you're not just not a competitor, you're not even a spectator.

Give them a break.

[orasio]

MSOffice97 was good enough for you when you bought it.
If your needs have changed it's only ok that you get a new version.

Of course, you could use OpenOffice 2.0, that works great indeed with MSOffice97 documents, and writes ODF natively.

What crack are you smoking?

[bberens]

Microsoft office products actually do have more features than the open source alternatives. These features include but are not limited to the support for the visually impaired which you yourself so graciously posted. Don't pretend either that OO.o is not completely bloated just like MS Office products. It's a great product that I use every day, but let's not kid ourselves. I can't believe you got modded insightful. I guess anything anti-M$ gets applaud around here.

Re:What crack are you smoking?

[BrokenHalo]

These features include but are not limited to the support for the visually impaired...
 
Ummm. Don't you mean vision impaired? Visually impaired sort of implies they are not so great to look at.
 
:-P

Re:What crack are you smoking?

[whitehatlurker]

I keep hearing about enhanced support in MicroSoft Office for the blind. What are these features? I am sighted, and I don't see anything that MSO provides that would help me if I were to go blind. Unless you mean voice input, and I think I'd be able to type faster than speak most of the time.

BSD license = good!

[radarsat1]

Well I was amazed to see no one had commented on their choice of LICENSE yet. It's interesting to see what MS would choose as a license in their foray into the OSS world. I would have been really surprised if they'd chosen GPL, because of obvious ethical conflicts, but I don't think I quite expected them to choose BSD.

This is significant, because it means developers are free to take the code and do what they want with it. For instance, how many people actually have Word 2007? With the BSD license someone could back-port it to previous versions...

It also implies that MS can't get away with "embrace and extend", because whatever they choose to do, someone will come along and create a custom version with the cruft removed. Consequently, I expect they just won't bother to put any in the first place. (Well, maybe that's wishful thinking.)

Additionally, if this plugin integrates badly with Word, making it difficult or non-obvious for people to use, or doesn't adequately convert certain features that it could probably handle better, someone is free to come along and improve it!

Even if the MS project doesn't accept people's suggestions and changes, the BSD license ensures that anyone is free to fork it and release their own version.

So: The fact that they chose the BSD license is a really important detail here.. very interesting move.

Re:BSD license = good!

[Atzanteol]

Why speculate? The blog post mentions that this plugin converts from OpenXML to ODF. And that OpenXML will be backported and thus ODF will be able to be backported as well.

Rampant speculation is nothing compared to some reading comprehension...

Another cool piece of this is that it will also work in older versions of Office. This is because the tools leverage the Open XML support, and we're providing free updates to previous versions of Office that allow them to read and write Open XML. It's another great benefit of leveraging the Open XML formats for the tool.

Re:BSD license = good!

[Locutus]

you forget, MSopen XML was submitted to the ECMA. The ECMA allows patented materials in formats submitted to it for a public standardization. Microsofts .Net stuff is the same way. So, just how much of Microsofts patented MSopen XML format is going to be in this BSD-like licensed plugin? If Microsoft patented how they put a PageBreak in MSopen XML, you won't see it in the ODF plugin. And if you go and reverse engineer their MSopen XML and add that PageBreak code to the plugin, don't even think about releasing THAT to the public without a license from Microsoft.

This is Microsoft we are talking about, so don't think there is any way this can be used for anything but directing people to use Microsoft products and Microsoft proprietary formats on Microsfot Windows. It's just the way the marketing company called Microsoft works. History shows this. IMO.

LoB

Re:Let Me Be The First To Say

[orasio]

Your Fail It

Bad news for Open Office

[NineNine]

Now, there's really no reason for anybody to use Open Office (or Star Office, or whatever they're called this week). MS Office will continue to be used almost exclusively because it can now handle any document, and of course, most of the outside world will still use MS Office documents.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[fishdan]

...Now, there's really no reason for anybody to use Open Office...

I couldn't decide if you were trolling or not, but I'll assume not in deference to your relatively low userid.

No reason? How about price? How about working on older platforms? How about wanting stuff in ODF now? I actually see it just the opposite. Now there's no reason to store a document in any format OTHER than ODF -- regardless of your editor. Which is awesome. You want to use MS Office? Party On Wayne! You want to use Open Office? Party On Garth! Either way, anyone will be able to read/open/work on your documents. Cool.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[bubkus_jones]

No, there are still every other reason why people choose OO.o versus MS Office. Cost, open source, and it's not MS being among the most common.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[NineNine]

OK, whatever you say. Time will tell. The thing is that the OSS zealots always bring up price, but in reality, end-user, shirnk-wrapped software is NOT expensive. I've never heard anybody complain about software prices. I can't think of anything that really is all that prohibitively expensive. Now, my $1200/workstation point-of-sale software is another story... (but of course, there's nothing decent that's open source).

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[fmoliveira]

You forgot the 3rd world, your insensitive clod!

People generally buy their computers in 24 monthly payments here, this without office. Office alone cost more than our minimal montly wage.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[level_headed_midwest]

People don't complain because they never see the real cost:

1. Office comes preinstalled on their computer and the price of the software is absorbed into the price of the computer as a whole. Also, OEMs get a little cheaper version of Office to tie to a new computer (Office 2003 Basic OEM is generally $99-150 instead of $250 for the full version in a store.) Some OEMs also check that Office box by default, so you won't necessarily even see that cost as extra...

2. They borrow Office CDs from friends who got them from work or they get it from their kid that got it from BitTorrent- so they pay nothing at all.

3. They share their kid's educational version that was $67, $100, or $119 instead of $250. The resultant $33-$60 a seat does not sound bad, but it's not 100% in accordance with the EULA either in most cases.

Only a handful of people actually go out and buy shrink-wrapped, boxed MSFT products- MSFT even says so themselves. They even mulled over not selling Vista in boxes- only on new computers.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[NineNine]

Oh, that's entirely possible. I have no clue about 3rd world countries and how they deal with computers and software.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[winnabago]

You're kidding, right?

Can you really distiguish "end user" software from apps for workstations? Software gets expensive, particularly for the non-governmental small office type of business. I maintain our 4 machines, and each has about $9k of licenced software that is updated biannually or so. We DON'T buy MS Office, and the money is a significant reason why not. OO and thunderbird are fine, and it's important to save where we can. To counter your point, what if we had 400 machines? We would be browsing sourceforge a little more regularly, given that huge multiplier.

Oh, and also relevant to this discussion, Autodesk is a corporation accountable to shareholders, yet they have provided a free downloadable viewer/converter to the open DXF format for years. Users, the ones who provide them with that capital, asked for it. On the other hand, the chances of them making anything for OSX or *NIX are almost exactly zero, but it's a start.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[stuuf]

It's not like governments started mandating ODF and then everyone started crying because they can't use MS Office anymore. People are tired of Offices's expensive licenses and lock-in, so they're switching to ODF, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Microsoft is making half-assed lie after half-assed lie about "opening" their own format or promising to support ODF so they can still hold on to the market. This plugin will likely have little actual support from Microsoft, relying on the open source community to finish it. MS Office will probably never be "ODF-compliant" to the degree that other apps have already been for years, simply because they don't want it to be.

BTW, OpenOffice and StarOffice are two related but distinct things which have coexisted for some time, not two different names for the same product at different times (since Sun aquired it).

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[Petrushka]

Office comes preinstalled on their computer and the price of the software is absorbed into the price of the computer as a whole.

Just for what it's worth, in my home town a lot of shops (including at least one major chain) sell all their computers with OpenOffice.org preinstalled (customers can buy MS Office and have that preinstalled as well, for an extra fee). I think the second part of your sentence still applies, too. No, wait, I tell a lie: when I bought a box last year, I bought it without an OS, so they gave me OpenOffice.org on a CD instead. Obviously this isn't the case everywhere -- damn shame, that.

Re:Bad news for Open Office

[level_headed_midwest]

Your case certainly happens with small hometown makers- but just try to buy an OS-less consumer-grade machine from HP or Dell. That's why I'd support smaller vendors and mom 'n pops if I needed a laptop or other machine I couldn't build- the choice in OS and software is more than worth the small extra price.

And the reason was ...

[houghi]

Belium and Massachusetts. Software is developed by a Frech, an Indian and a German company.

Sound like Europe has become the fighter of freedom of the people. I also like the quote on this Flemish site that Microsoft Tom Robertson sayd that they noticed that cusomers did not want homogenity, but diversity.

Darn, the cat has not even left the house and the mice are already dancing.

Re:And the reason was ...

[Atzanteol]

Belium and Massachusetts ... Sound[sic] like Europe has become the fighter of freedom of the people.

Since when did Massachusetts join the EU?

Re:And the reason was ...

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Since when did Massachusetts join the EU?

Or India, for that matter?

Re:And the reason was ...

[caluml]

Since when did Massachusetts join the EU? They said that it had been a good experiment, but that in the end they felt like coming back home, and that they expect other states will follow their lead.

Re:And the reason was ...

[JavaTHut]

Belium and Massachusetts. Software is developed by a Frech, an Indian and a German company.

Belium and Massachusetts ... Sound[sic] like Europe has become the fighter of freedom of the people.

I think it was a couple months after India joined

PR Stunt

[a_karbon_devel_005]

First off, plugins like this were going to arise anyway. Look at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aodl). This is a conversion program started in 2005. MS has just decided it would like to be "officially, but not too officially" in charge of it.

Interesting comments in the blog:

While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some governments request that we help build solutions so that can use ODF for certain situations...

From my understanding this is more along the lines of "certain governments in all situations." But, hell, MS can probably win those markets back with an Open Office that supports ODF in some way, but as a plugin MS can blame the standard or the plugin writers (who are working on an Open project, remember, not a MS one!). Which brings us to:

Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it?

A little late to ask these questions isn't it? Why not just go to the OASIS site (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php? wg_abbrev=odf-adoption) become a member, and get the standards set for the stuff you need? Oh. Because you really don't care, you're just doing "lip DIS-service" to ODF by pointing out the problems that all standards run into.

If Microsoft had gone to OASIS and said "Look we really love this ODF stuff, but to interoperate properly with Office, it would have to support feature X, Y and Z, at least in theory" it would have happened for SURE. However, they were betting that once MS said "hey we won't support ODF" then the "turncoat" governmental offices that had demanded ODF would say "oh... well... poo" and go back to Office.

...but who is actually extending this time?

[plj]

It is interesting that Jones accuses OO.o for extending the ODF spec. From his blog:

“OpenOffice has actually made the decision to extend the spec in ways that don't actually appear to be allowed (like with numbering formats), and I'm not sure if that's the right way to go. I've seen a lot of problems when moving documents from OpenOffice to KOffice for example, and I'm sure these divergences from the spec don't help out. Is the right thing to extend in the same ways OpenOffice did, or is it best to wait for OASIS to release the next version of the spec and hope that it specifies some of those missing features? Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it? What about features that aren't in ODF or in OpenOffice? Should we create new extensions ourselves or just lose that information? It's going to be fun working with everyone to figure this stuff out.”

I'm not capable to judge whether this is true or just FUD, but it is interesting nevertheless.

Re:Excellent news-Really.

[ananthap]

MS just made it difficult to save data in ODF format. (need to exprt as ODF while the default is "Open"XML).

So, since you can't teach all the word to export as ODF, most people will end up saving files in microsoft's own formats.

Micrsoft is also changing the defaults for the new office. (docx, xlsx, pptx etc). Same thing applies. These new formats are incompatible with earlier versions of office and so people - after a time - will perforce have to pay upgrade tax.

End

Re:Caved? Hardly!

[andrewman327]

You got it. I have been very happy with OoO's .doc support (I use Documents to Go with my LifeDrive and it doesn't yet support ODF) which I think has been a key to its popularity. If they can make things work fairly seemlessly between the two formats, I expect that Microsoft can do at least as well.

You should however RTA

[brufar]

This was covered in the article..

Another cool piece of this is that it will also work in older versions of Office.

MS will never learn or change...

[fuego451]

As usual, PJ over at Groklaw has interesting information and insight into this latest from Microsoft.

It never ceases to amaze me that some people still want to believe that MS is 'now' trying to do the right thing.

Re:MS will never learn or change...

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

OK, I used to love Groklaw and still do find some interesting things there. However, is it just me or is that site turning into a bit of the Rush Limbaugh of the FOSS movement? ;-)

Re:MS will never learn or change...

[fuego451]

I understand your thoughts but Paralegals are as tenacious as bulldogs and once they bite you in the ass they will not let go until the truth is found. I know because I'm married to one.

I do believe, though, that Rush is a poor comparison when it comes to 'truth' in reporting, or anything else for that matter.

Re:its going to ship ship?

[Intron]

UPS Tracking Summary

• May 1, 2006 On Truck
• May 2, 2006 New truck arrived
• May 3, 2006 Left Long Beach, CA
• May 10, 2006 Out for delivery
• May 17, 2006 Out for delivery
• May 24, 2006 Out for delivery
• June 1, 2006 Out for delivery
• June 8, 2006 Out for delivery
• June 15, 2006 Out for delivery
• June 17, 2006 Left on front porch

About Time

[tfl]

I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to get MS to see sense and support OpenDoc. This is good news - although a bit late (and sadly not in the box).

OK, but how about.....

[the eric conspiracy]

This is certainly a step forward for users everywhere, but what about MS-Project? There is no open interoperability between MS Project and any other tools at all.

What a Contrast

[soloport]

Pepsi: Yo, Coke. Some loonies on line one say they have your secrets. But don't worry. We're setting up a sting.
Coke: Uh. Ok.
The Press: So, Pepsi, why did you feel the need to do the right thing?
Pepsi: Because competition should be fair.

Microsoft: Idiots!

I, for one...

[Lord of Hyphens]

welcome our BSD-using ODF plugin overlords...

Well, I would if I wasn't already using OpenOffice.

Re:Again, I don't see what all the fuss is about

[AntiDragon]

OK, I'm gonna bite.

Ah, but that's the point, see? This isn't about migrating to a single format or the like - it's about knowing that whatever changes happen to the software that you use, the format and rules for reading and writing data are *well known* - open, in fact.

The commercial interoperation you speak of is something that has been painfully bought by those who worked for it. Even now, OpenOffice.org has problems opening Word documents because parts of the format are unknown. It had to be reverse engineered - there was no guide or manual about how to read or write it. Or (getting old now) Lotus Notes and Excel - they certainly didn't convert easily to each other. Both closed formats. I have clients who wanted to review some old financial spreadsheets. They were very old password protected Lotus 1-2-3 files. The client only had Excel. Guess the outcome there...

But most of all, by relying on a closed format, by being tied to a single program to reliably read and write your data, you are effectively putting your work in a lockbox and handing someone else the key. You have to trust them not to lose that key, or decide that your model of lockbox is no longer supported. You also have to hope that the person who has your key never vanishes.

Maybe a bad analogy, and certainly it's an argument with strong moralistic aspects, but there are sound, practical reasons for me to have my data in a format I can access easily and look up the specs for.

On a more pragmatic level, an open format makes it extremely easy to write software that can use that format. I could write a web order system that update an ODF spreadsheet with data on each new order. Or create a custom mail merge program using a template ODF document to automate mail shots from a mailing list. Not the best examples but valid ones - *I know how to edit the contents of the document myself if I need to*.

And just one final note - OfficeXML is NOT OPEN. The spec doesn't explain the parts that contain binary data - data that could include vital formating information for example.

Personally, I feel the more open formats the better. The best will always win through. But if just one part of a file format spec is held back, it's not "Open". And that's where we stand with ODF vs DOC/DOCX. And since it *is* a battle, maybe falling in line behind one certain format is better than pushing several at the same time.

"caved in"? yeah, right

[Tom]

As if.

MS has probably realized that the usual embrace, extend, extinguish will work better than flat out refusal. Let's see:

Scenario A: MS refuses to do ODF
Since ODF is making inroads in many places, and is being written into laws in others, flat out refusal will mean either someone else writes a plugin (oops, already happened) or people switch to OpenOffice. Also, it'll mean that Office XML is dead, dead, dead because everyone interested in XML office documents will use ODF while those interested in MS Office will stay with legacy formats.

Scenario B: MS does an Office plugin
If MS "supports" ODF, then everyone used to Word will stay with Word instead of switching to OpenOffice. Also, lots and lots of these people will use Office XML as their document format and only convert to ODF when necessary, a process MS can greatly enhance by making sure that their ODF implementation is just slightly less convenient than their Office XML implementation.
Then, a couple years down the road, they'll add some killer feature that they only implement into Office XML and not their ODF version. Or they extend ODF the way they tried with Kerberos.

"caved in". Pfft.

A better way

[Comboman]

A better way to do it would be if you try to open a file format that is "unknown" to the default Office, it would check the MS website for an appropriate plug-in, much the way Windows Media Player checks for new codecs when you try to open a media file it doesn't recognize.

Better still would be to ask after it downloads the plug-in "Do you want to make ODF the default format for saving Office documents?". Fat chance of that happening though.

If they really caved..

[2phar]

they would support an open source project to get Word formats supported in Open Office. This ploy may succeeed in diverting talent from working on support for DOC/OpenXML in FOSS office apps, which would be far more desirable IMHO.

Re:If they really caved..

[The Cisco Kid]

A. the source of an 'open source' app that can convert between MS format and ODF should be study-able to produce what you just asked for.

B. No, it wouldnt, Far better for MS users to have to use an awkward plugin to read and write the standard/open format, than for *everyone else* to have to use plugins to read/write MS proprietary format.

Covenant Not to Sue

[MrCopilot]

Open XML Formats Are for Everyone to Use We've made the Open XML file formats available for everyone to use. The file formats are simple standards-based XML text and are readable by a broad range of XML authoring and editing tools. We've applied a new intellectual property sharing approach to the file formats, which includes a Covenant Not To Sue (CNS) provision to assure software developers that they can use the file formats for free and without financial or intellectual property consideration toward Microsoft. We've also submitted the file formats along with other industry leaders for continued development and management by the Ecma International standards organization.

We hope and expect that millions of third-party developers around the world will build solutions using the Open XML file formats. Already, hundreds of thousands of developers are working with the XML capabilities of Microsoft Office. Any developer may use or join the OpenXMLDeveloper.org community to receive the latest information and participate in active code-sharing and experience-sharing opportunities.

Come join the covenant, Be one with the covenant. Or we Will Sue your ass.

Strategic move to prevent users from installing...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Open office.

If someone gives you an Open doc format, Microsoft doesnt want you installing the free competition to read it.

They want to keep you in their Office suite. (which is very nice btw)

Same goes for OO.o

[I'm Don Giovanni]

And by the same token OO.o will have to compete on its features rather than, "Use us because we support ODF!!".

Re:Same goes for OO.o

[whitehatlurker]

Other than a multi-variable "solver" functionality, I can't think of anything that OOo lacks that I would need. (And the solver that MicoSoft uses was actually developed by others.)

Actually, OOo 2.0 has a bibiography editor which would come in very handy in MSO, and a nice equation editor.

I guess word art and clippy are lacking ... what are the special features that attract you to MSO?

Whats the speedlimit of a file?

[dilvish_the_damned]

file performance

How fast does the file format go anyhow? I tried to benchmark .DOC vs ODF but the files just seem to sit there really quickly. Possibly too quick to measure. Maybe I need a faster machine.

Why the crazy UI?

[Nurgled]

The obvious UI for this would be to have it be just another item on the "Save as Type..." list in the Save dialog, and another type it supports through the standard Open dialog. There isn't a "Word Document" or an "HTML" submenu on the file menu. Why this inconsistent UI?

Re:Why the crazy UI?

[TheSpoom]

Because Microsoft won't ship it with Office. That's the whole point: In order to obtain ODF compatibility, you'll have to do something extra in order to get it to work.

People are lazy, and Microsoft knows that; 90% of people will just request that documents be sent in .doc so they won't have to bother.

Re:What good is it...

[assassinator42]

And can I install those plugins without being an administrator? I doubt it. They need to include it by default.

VB Macros

[jcole]

I once wrote a VB macro for both Excel and Word that iterated through all of our documents on our share server. It opened and output each document to an .html format so our search could index them (don't ask). I had this run every day on updated files and it worked quite well. I had it write a log file to track it's progress and so the macro would know where it left off in case of a crash. Exporting to ODF with this plugin in a similar fashion should be trivial. (tip: if you attempt this, you can cheat by using the record macro functionality in office and then modifying the generated code to your liking)

-Joe

MS Office: Equations

[Spaceman40]

It's more of an Emacs thing: Ctrl-this and Meta-that. I didn't think it was disabled, at least in MS Office 2003, but I could be mistaken.

Definitely a pain to work with, though. As I said above, if you want to do large amounts of equation editing, use OOo or LaTeX.

A token

[PhotoGuy]

By not including the support in the core product, this is effectively a token move. I have found that 99% of end users will not install additional components, even if it's a free download. Office is pre-installed on their computers (or installed by their IT people); but ODF will not gain obiquity if Office does not support it "out of the box." (Unless enough brave governments buck MS's strangehold.)

Re:A token

[The Cisco Kid]

Of course, if a tool that (maybe?) is able to completely read/write/interpret MS document format may be the more valuable bit here, assuming it continues to be updated as MS updates the formats. If lots of installed base of non-MS applications get installed becuase now they can properly read MS formats, MS will have a lot larger backlash if they change them in an incompatible fashion. This will also allow people who are unwilling or unable to release from MS teat to be able to store/create/submit/read documents to/for/from governments in ODF format, so that they will always be readable, thus removing another (wrong to begin with) objection to governments standardizing on that format.

Now that I have collected 3 redundant replies...

[Lord of Hyphens]

I had all the .NET form stuff floating through my head when I asked that.

Re:Caved? Hardly!

[Locutus]

If they can make things work fairly seemlessly between the two formats, I expect that Microsoft can do at least as well.

What makes you think Microsoft WANTS to do good conversions between their proprietary format and the public ODF format? Surely there is absolutely no history of this. You've got some 'inside' information? ;-)

LoB

Re:Caved? Hardly!

[andrewman327]

I never said that they were going to do as well or that they wanted to do as well. I only said that I know they can do as well if they reaelly honestly tried.

Complete BS

[Anonymous Coward]

And just one final note - OfficeXML is NOT OPEN. The spec doesn't explain the parts that contain binary data - data that could include vital formating information for example.

I call it bullshit. And challenge you to point out what vital formating information of the OpenXML is binary or undocumented.

OpenXML is as open as ODF. The rest is FUD.

Nail, of head: "Ouch!"

[jdbartlett]

You've got it right. This approach makes mad at Microsoft - they are trying to sell this weaseling as a service to the OSS community. Not only will few people download the patch (few workers will even have the administrative authority to do so), those who do use it will probably use it to import ODF files only to unwittingly save them in Microsoft's proprietary format.

Microsoft has no valid reason for such opposition to ODF. (Their excuse so far has been that it's "slow" - sounds more like a problem with their software than ODF itself.)

Nothing has convinced me more to stay clear of Microsoft products than its abusive attitude toward a cross-compatible office suite file format. Not even Windows ME has done as much damage to my personal opinion of the company: they are inept sobbing slackers. They have good cause for their inferiority complex, but their attitude to their clients and consumers goes beyond unprofessional.

ODF or fight.

Re:Caved? Hardly!

[Dadoo]

I am sure that they will do a half-hearted job of supporting ODF, and people will grow frustrated with how "limited" it is compared to the native XML file type.

I hope that's not true. It'll really suck, in twenty years, when the government tries to print out your birth certificate and they can't, because it's in Word 97 format and MicroSoft discontinued support for that format 10 years earlier.

Incidently, as much as I'd like to see MicroSoft be required to compete on a level playing field, that's only a small part of why we want ODF. The real reason we want ODF is so that we can read our government documents in the future.

Re:Clarification to Clarifications

[SanityInAnarchy]

Re: manual page breaks, come on, it is a 0.1 release.

And it took me ten minutes to add this functionality to a Ruby OpenDocument-to-HTML tool. Boo-frickin'-hoo.

When it's possible to set OpenDocument as the default format for MS Office, and when I can actually open 99% of them in OpenOffice and have them look identical, I'll believe they're serious about this. Until then, it's vaporware, in the evilest sense of the word.

Re:in other words..you're too lazy

[Locutus]

Bull sh1t, what I said was that you will NOT be able to add Microsofts proprietary extensions to its plugin and they are not going to put their proprietary code, or conversion for such, in this open source project.

Anybody would be far better off helping with one of the other plugins since the goal of THOSE projects will be compatibility and not showing how bad ODF document conversions can be and why MS OpenXML is supposedly better than ODF.

LoB

Who said it?

[killjoe]

If the quote is from an MS employee it has an 80% chance of being a lie or at least not the whole truth.

Quite a caving in, actually.

[jbn-o]

The caving refers to the difference between Microsoft's initial reluctance to do anything with ODF and their current position. Previously, all Microsoft reps did in Massachusetts was complain that it isn't good for disabled users (which, as numerous people have pointed out, has far more to do with an application than a file format) and is inadequate for government use. Their ironic complaint that they were being dictated to on file formats got well-deserved laughter from those who followed the case closely. Microsoft was missing how users were being treated—being told that Microsoft's changing format was what Microsoft dictated to them. In light of the secret changes to Microsoft Office formats, the state's insistence on preserving government documents into the forseeable future (which Mass. viewed as state soverignty) was never adequately addressed by Microsoft.

It's not so much that what you're saying is untrue, so much as what you're saying doesn't address how this change of stance is a caving-in for Microsoft. Their latest behavior doesn't jibe with their previous behavior, and now the public can see that even Microsoft needs to change in order to "compete in new markets where they were being gradually squeezed out". Hence, Microsoft is caving in to persistent competitive force.

Vigilance being the eternal price of freedom, it will be up to us to continue to point out the dangers of using proprietary software at all and making sure that all ODF implementors abide by the spec and produce interoperable documents. Don't let people convince you that this task is impossible. Those same people would have told you years ago that any ODF progress was a pipe dream (the initial reason PDF was not pitched as an editable file format, according to a Mass. state rep discussing ODF) and that nobody will make free (as in freedom) software.