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What Does the Microsoft ODF Converter Mean?
Andy Updegrove writes "It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project - time enough for 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out what it all means. In this entry, I report on a long chat with Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs Jason Matusow, and match up his responses with the official messaging in the converter press release. The result is a picture of a continuing, if slow and jerky, evolution within Microsoft as those that recognize market demands for more openness debate those that want to follow the old way. This internal divide means that the proponents of change need to point to real market threats in order to justify incremental changes. This adaptation by reaction process leaves Microsoft still lagging the market, but has allowed those that favor a more open approach to gradually turn the battle ship a few degrees at a time."
Not so good times for Microsoft anymore... :-)
Today I saw this: www.officeviewers.com
You mean, like OO.o already has?
f fice
OO.o has extended ODF for its own purposes since the ODF spec itself is incomplete (e.g. lack of a standard for storing spreadsheet formulas).
And how about this little gem?
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/applications/ko
"Our tests show that OpenOffice and KOffice have some problems opening each other's OpenDocument files. Also, support for drawings is a bit incomplete."
I wouldn't be surprised if MS ends up with better ODF support (i.e. more compliant to the spec, as opposed to just trying to mimic whatever OO.o does) than most ODF-native suites.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
1. It's not a file format as recognized by Word, it is an export format. As such you don't save to it, you export to it or import from it. It appears that it will be treated much like PDF and XPS is in Word 2007. It's a separate menu item directly off of the new main menu (accessable from the Office logo in the top-left corner, since Word 2007 no longer has a File menu.) As such it is very doubtful that you could specify that ODF be a default format for Word.
2. Due to point 1, this is moot.
3. If one format does not contain the necessary markup to support a feature or a function then I do believe that it is appropriate to enumerate those risks to the end user. You will think it's intentional sabotage if the program warns the user, and you will think that it's intentional sabotage if the feature simply isn't exported, or is exported incorrectly due to implementation differences. Frankly it's a lose-lose proposition.