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Does ODF Have a Future?
qedramania writes "Linuxworld seems to think ODF is a dead duck. Is the Windows monopoly too big and too entrenched? Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing? It seems as though the momentum is towards a complete Microsoft monoculture in software for business and government. You can bet that big business and governments will want more than just reliability from Microsoft in return for their acquiescence. Does ODF have a future?"
Open Office will happily read/write/create MS Word files. That said, it seems that ODF is gaining popularity, not losing it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't think it's a technical issue at all, it's just what people "know". Whenever I go on a job hunt people ask for my resume "in a Word .doc", as if that's the only possible format.
What motivation do other countries have to send their tax dollars to Redmond so that they can write local laws?
ODF is not going to take off in the US until AFTER the rest of the world has adopted it. So let's look at what other governments and such are adopting Linux / ODF.
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'nuff said.
And vice versa. Who uses DB2 at home? Or Oracle? Or SQL Server? But I'll bet anybody using Open Office Base has as many ODB files lying around as a Microsoft Office Access user had MDB files lying around.
The needs of the enterprise and the needs of the individual are different- might they not be better served by different formats?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If ODF became as popular as the metric system, I think it could be considered a success. Still, a lovely riposte.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I prefer OpenDocument, and I am putting my money into it: OpenDocument export is finally finished for our TextMaker word processor and will be released in a few days.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Option 1: Continue to use MS formats, and continue to pay. Save money now in the short term.
:). Yes, it will be expensive to convert from .doc to ODF, but won't it be worth it in the long run?
:)
Option 2: Break free from MS formats, and help develop a better, free format. Outlay some money to break free, never pay again (unless you're feeling charitable.
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF. Print a couple of copies and stick them up somewhere. Maybe include a link to openoffice.org.
ODF is far from dead.
...but only if it's old.
From the fine article:
"The deadline is July 20, 2007"
I'll get right on it then.
--
BMO
this depends on you (yes YOU Mr. AC) creating valuable things in ODF formats and releasing them on the internet under free licenses. Think, for example, of tax optimising spreadsheets; of sample contracts and example letters. If you do this then enough people will get ODF readers that it will be a standard. Just remember ODF and .doc are not exclusive. You can even have open office on the same PC as you have word.
The MS-Office monopoly has so far been nearly impossible to beat. But things can change quite rapidly. Terms like vendor-lock and interoperability will eventually penetrate the skulls of the thickest CIOs and CTOs.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards. Even before you mention the word Open Standards, immediately others pushing Free Software agenda and Open Source agenda push their pet projects, creating an impression it is all one and the same and one can not have Open Standards without also Open Source and Free Software. They are different.
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly (like it is with Intuit-Quicken and MS-Money). But it is definitely better than the monopoly. Once the customers are educated about the vendor lock and compatibility the duopoly will naturally break down. Eventually there will be enough space for Free Software, Open Software, and Close source software to coexist.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
First of all "Linuxworld" is anything but. They should be required to change their name to "MicrosoftFUDsterPretendingToRepresentLinux." This would at least clue readers into the fact that they're anti-Linux.
LinuxWorld is just trolling and spreading FUD with their "just too big, why bother, you can't win, give up, don't try, it'll never work, it can't happen, you're just wasting your time, resistance is futile" rhetoric
Their words are as dog farts. They are not to be considered!
...to TeX? It has a steep learning curve, but damn once you get used to it you can't go back to anything else (kinda like RPN calculators). So much cleaner than "document" files...
File format isn't what people are worried about when purchasing software, it's the software itself!
Office is expensive, but OpenOffice doesn't look as good, doesn't work as well and feels cobbled together.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It's a great alternative that only computer literate people will every try, and that most businesses will ignore because it doesn't matter for them.
And then the alternative will gain marketshare to the point that even mainstream consumers are trying it out, which will cause businesses to notice.
Honestly, the analogy I'd think of is Imperial vs. Metric. The rest of the world isn't nearly as wedded to Microsoft as the US is. Therefore, we're likely to see uptake of ODF become significant elsewhere before it becomes significant in the USA.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I'm pretty sure ODF isn't dying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Office 2007 natively (or with a plugin available from MS's website) supports ODF as a native format to save and open from, just like you can specify that Word uses .doc instead of .docx.
IMHO, ODF is far from being dead.
It should be pretty easy to push for ODF at the local government level for non-US governments.
If nothing else the tax savings will be worth it. You can run on the "I just saved our city 5 million local units of exchange every year for the next 20 years! That's 100 million local units of exchange I've save this city. Vote for me AGAIN!"
And once the file format monopoly is cracked, look for Linux deployments to increase.
Res publica non dominetur
The entity that installed the ring, expects to recover the cost of the ring, plus a lot more.
Freedom is not free, but slavery costs more.
Then there were text editors tied to document preparation systems. Anyone remember RunOff/Runnem?
Then there were integrated full word processing software that you could load onto your general purpose computers. WordStar anyone? Surely you remember Word Perfect!
All of these existed and flourished well in their time, and all existed before MSWord, whose first incarnation on the PC/XT was wretched!
To say that MSWord can never be dethroned is bunk! MS loves to hear this talk, since you're defeated and they win before the battle has even begun. Previous solutions lost out when something better and cheaper came alone.
The more MS hikes the cost of MSOffice, the more they make it more difficult to use (WGA on Office anyone?), the more they remove MSWord from the virtually free Works package, the more Open Office improves while maintaining its low, low cost of Free, the more OEM's cut costs by preloading OO so that you have it right out of the box, the more MS has to worry about.
Talk defeat, and that's what you'll get. Then only MS will be cheering.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The rest of the industrialized world seems on track to adopt ODF as the defacto standard for government documents (Brazil, India, France, India, Denmark, Belgium, Malaysia, Croatia, Norway, Spain, Argentina). All of them have either adopted ODF as a standard or appear to be in the process. California is considering it and while Massachuesettes may be saying the OOXML is an open standard and can be used internally I still am under the understanding that all government documents will still have to be made available in ODF format as well as whatever other formats they choose as well.
You have to remember while MS Office has a large install base but most of the time when documents are made available on the web or exchanged via email, it is done in the form of PDF's. That means that since Open Office can output to a PDF without purchasing other tools that it actually has an advantage over all versions of office pre 2007.
It will take some time because of the install base of Office XP and 2003 out there but when companies look to upgrade in a cost effective manner and potentially need to utilize both ODF and Doc formats they will choose Open Office. Microsoft looks like it is going to put its head in the sand and not implement ODF into Office 2007 and therefore it will force those who need to work with government agencies to either constantly convert things or use Open Office. Also remember that it looks like MS Office 2007 does not have built in export to pdf functionality its an external plugin that has to be included or installed and that it looks like for anti trust reasons MS may have to disable that functionality at least in the EU if not the states as well. If I'm a company I don't want to have to buy Office and then Acrobat crap just to be able to write to PDF's.
All that OO has to do to cement their viability is to refine the UI a little more. I find some functions cumbersome for those used to Office's interface but those that have to switch to 2007 from Office 2003 seem to become even more baffled.
... or we could have that "duopoly" you talked about with Safari as the other "half" of the pie.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
As more and more people stop caring about what office suite they use, MS Office will lose market share. The question is not if, but when, and to whom. Will OpenOffice.org take over, or will people skip it and switch directly to the next generation: Online office suites?
It seems to me that open formats are most important for government archival purposes. That is, state governments are producing huge amounts of public documents that really ought to be preserved for posterity. Saving them in an open format (free from copyright protection which lasts 120 years in the instance of an institutional author like MS) seems to be a pretty good step to take towards that goal.
My question is, what are the practices of digital archival in state governments? Do they even have one? I'm taking it for granted that things like bills and committee reports are turned into pdfs and made publicly available, but what about letters to constituents, emails between legislators and things like that?
ODF isn't there to dethrone MS as the word processor of choice, to think so is a bit foolish. It's there to provide a format that *everyone* can use. I will continue to use MS Office because I think it's a superior product, but ODF allows me to *save* my MS Office documents to format that *anyone* else can use, but more importantly convert from when I want to read my own documents in 20 years.
Remember, ODF is not a platform, word processor, gizmo, Office killer, etc. It's only a standard in which to format documents.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
There are other reasons why businesses ignore firefox - application compatibility. There are some things that only work well, or work at all, in Internet Explorer. Heck, there are some things that won't work in IE7 that work fine in IE6.
I'm sure there are a lot of IT people in business that would like to move away from IE to Firefox, but it would just be too damn expensive to redevelop critical software to remove the IE-only components.
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That's simply laziness on their part. Laziness, and ignorance. They should be asking for your resume in a format able to be opened by Word.
The only reason I see for MSWord as an absolute requirement anywhere are tasks to be automated either through the built-in VBA scripting language, or a COM interface to use MSWord from another program. And how many users actually ever do that?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have both MS Office and Open Office installed on the computer I'm currently using. I almost always use Open Office, even though MS Office has already been paid for. I see advantages and disadvantages to both, but to say that Open Office "feels cobbled together", strikes me as an odd feeling to have...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Just a question that's never answered well, and might have prevented this problem to start with. Why was ODF created in the first place? Why not just run with RTF, which to this day seems capable of saving everything in a Word document, even if it does blow up documents with embedded images to ungodly size on occasion. Was it necessary for the OO people to have a format they owned completely? If they'd just taken RTF, would we have this big schism today?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Right at the end, the article suggests an alternative:
Earlier on, the article talks about how it's too expensive to "rip out and replace" MS Office with ODF. Well yeah. Often in technology, a new technology doesn't have to be better - it has to offer something compelling that the old one doesn't, such as a lower price, convenience, mobility, or networking. The new technology gains a foothold in its niche, then starts to expand beyond it - without necessarily ever completely replacing the older technology. Thus we have cell phones displacing land lines, YouTube pressuring television (despite its crappy quality), MP3s replacing CDs, laptops gaining on desktops, digital cameras edging out film, etc.
So it seems to me that the strategy of perfect emulation is a strategy for failure: if ODF does exactly th same thing, is the freedom it offers enough to compel organizations to switch? (We might say yes, but then we know the consequences of lock-in and we don't have to make the up-front investment.) On the other hand, for all its weaknesses, HTML offers all sorts of things that Word lacks (e.g. accessibility and reformatting for differetn devices, universal browser support, Net-friendly, strong semantics), and is probably good enough for most uses. Thoughts?
HTML, etc. are open-standards. The problem here is how to get an open standard when none already exists. IE and Firefox could, by and large, display the same stuff.
If Microsoft doesn't support ODF and most people are using Office, the hurdle is that much higher. The web allows IE and Firefox to co-exist. ODF would allow Office and other products to co-exist. But we face the problem of getting ODF supported in the first place, which wasn't the problem with HTML and other web standards.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I prefer MS Office products at the office and Open Office at home.
It has to do with the collaboration tools and compatibility to other office applications. ODF has a while to go yet.
Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing?
At work I have Solaris and Linux workstations. I do not have a Windows PC. If I'm working on documentation, MS Word is not even an option. Nor is Excel. It's not possible. OK, I still don't use ODF much because our Solaris install that I could use until very recently was version 1.1.something, and only in recent weeks do I have access to 2.0.4. I've only had my Linux box for a few days now, and that seems to be version 1.1.5. I'm not an admin, I don't get to choose or install what I want. If they're phasing out the antique Solaris boxes (I have an Ultra 5 which is one of the better ones) then I'm also losing that 2.0 version of OpenOffice and the ability to use ODF files until our admin sees fit to give us a newer version. I've been using this antique Solaris box for 8 years and only last week got a Linux box. I don't imagine them spending money to give me a Windows box to run Office, and I'm also running out of room on my desk. I very much hope to get a newer OpenOffice version for Linux so I can do ODF.
Of course it does. Its future is so bright, you're gonna have to wear shades.
Folks, this is the heart of the matter. This is what needs to be understood by both sides of the argument:
What the poster misses is that people don't ... D O N O T accept or reject a file format. They, with the small subset of geeks on /., don't give a flip about file format. They accept or reject a program.
For ODF to be accepted, it has to be part of a program that most users have installed.
Program acceptance is usually established by:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
You couldn't be more wrong about business. They are starting to see that Microsoft's constant .doc format changes are costing them HUGE sums of money, particularly in regulated environments where documents have to be preserved for decades. Opening a 10 year old Word document is not a trivial task, and big bucks get spent trying to go back in time. If adopting ODF lets businesses reduce their document storage and retrieval costs, you bet they will start adopting it.
Will we ever conquer apathy and stupidity? No. Should we stop trying? No.
[quot]You can bet that big business and governments will want more than just reliability from Microsoft in return for their acquiescence.[/quote]
No, you can't. They haven't in the last 15 years, why would they start now?
The only way ODF will stand a chance in the US is if Federal, State, and Local governments stand up and support it by saying that they will only buy software that is compatible with it. Everyone does business with the government one way or another so they will eventually choose to follow suit. The problem is that no government entity in the US has the guts to take a stand. The Federal gov't embraces MS with open arms. I don't see the US actively supporting this and until they do, ODF will be just for idealistic computer nerds.
This is an outright lie.
Another lie. Where to they get this stuff?
There are only two reasons that I even notice. I create many documents and on a frequent basis I need documents from one or two years ago. Often, in the past, I have not been able to open those documents in later versions of MS Office. Second, I don't like being at the latest MS Office version, and I believe that sending out MS Office in old version has negatively impacted various interests in my life. Therefore I try to send stuff out as PDF as much as possible instead of word. Other Office applications have solved the problem that MS does not seem to be able to.
I understand that MS has gotten much better about file management, but those bad experiences moved me away from their product and file format. I completely understand why most people do not move, especially if the product is free, as it is often easier, though riskier and sometimes outright silly, to trade files in MS Office format. But if the extent of your writing is memo, most of the time it will not mater.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
A rule of thumb when trying to replace one product in the marketplace with another is that the new product needs two tangible advantages. ODF needs to have one "gotta-have" feature that non-technical people can understand and appreciate in order for it to successfully beat out Office.
Yes, ODF is theoretically cheaper then Office. However, the productivity boost of spending $500 / employee is a bargain when the employee's time is worth $50 / hour! (Remember, a guy making $20 an hour really does cost the company $40-$50 an hour.)
The "Open" aspect of ODF is too abstract for many people to understand. To the non-technical person, Office "just works".
Thus, in order for there to be a demand for ODF, there needs to be tangible features that work better with ODF then Office. What tangible features could people appreciate from ODF? Here are some suggestions that come to mind.
Thus, to repeat, in order for ODF to really succeed it needs to have easy-to-understand features that non-technical people will desire. Competing on price alone won't beat Office.
No, I will not work for your startup
should we just give up because M$ is too big? Can we make the argument that is in the same boat because the equivalent M$ product is widely adopted?
fsck M$ and all their blind worshipers. I say fight the power! Long live Linux! Long live The Community!
ok... i've calmed down now....
Power to the Penguin!
You know back in 2003 I would have still agreed but many of the IE only things are by companies that just don't get it. A bulk of it is javascript injected to only accept IE whether or not firefox can render it. I had to install the User Agent switcher to see some obsolete websites and they worked fine in firefox. There were still a few that didn't budge but it's such a small percentage.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Requiring MS Formats in any governmental document is a basic violation of free speech, no better than the British paper/ink tax which helped motivate the American colonies to fight the War of Independence.
;-)
& I'm a Brit. Why should I have to pay an American company for the right to use anything on the UK government website (e.g. Tax returns, ironically enough)? Do I get to vote in US elections? Or help send MS into chapter 11 (as if)?
We should be thinking in terms of basic democratic rights, not market forces: Dococracy for the masses
Ay Caramba!
It is one thing to get them to use a different web browser that works good with the threat of virusus and spyware otherwise... But it is an other if you want people to start changing their habbits just because you think it is morally right. As far as they are conserned I have Word at Home, I have Word at Work... My documents move easilly between them... Using Open Document Format means I will need to learn an other Word Processor for home, won't be supported at work... so why bother. Just use a Microsoft Doc format and they are happy... There is no Pain in using office, it is a good program no matter how much you don't want it to be. I used Open Office for a while but then my Boss was going to me why is it layed out all funky on my system, or if I printed it out he would go that isn't what I sent you it looked like this... I am sorry but Unless you can for ODF to be default save for Office 2000 and up, it is not going anywhere and Microsoft doesn't care for ODF so they wont make it their default save.
Except for complaining on how no one is using the technology you need to realize why noone is using your technology. There is rairly the Man trying to put you down, because people are good enough at putting themselfs down without the help of The Man
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unfortunately, one of those "companies" is the US government. Several federal sites do not work properly in Firefox. Although these are a small minority of all of their web-sites, I'm annoyed when I have to launch IE just to fill out a federal on-line form. I've never tried the "User Agent switcher".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF.
I don't think the slogan "Liberate your documents" is going to go over well with businesses. The image it evokes is security leaks and industrial espionage.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, the blurb for this article is confusing 2 different things - ODF's relevance and Microsoft's dominance. I'll put on my IT Director hat and toss in my $.02.
There's some big News To Me in this article and I wish the open source community would do a better job of informing the rest of the world of this crap. This article mentions that Microsoft's OOXML format can't be implemented by other vendors. What?!?!? That's News To Me. I'm sure the article is right, but frankly, I don't keep my nose to grindstone enough to follow this kind of religious news any more and it's the first time I've heard MS restricts who can implement this file format. It also says it's an import-only format that's basically junk. Really? I didn't know that and I just assumed that the format was reasonable and worked. Can the rest of the world's new organizations please make a big deal out of those facts?
OOXML is crap and ODF works. That's important and I didn't know it.
Now, let's look at Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace. I guarantee you that every IT Director in the world is figuring out how to get OpenOffice in the door and figuring out what role it can play. When I look at my budget for the year I want eradicate any line item having to do with licensing. Realistic? No. Can we cut back on things? Hell yeah. We don't need every PC in this company having a copy of MS Office. For us, Outlook is a bitch, but the Exchange web client is pretty good. Visio and Project are tough ones, but not everyone uses it. Some people have custom integration with Excel, but those people are also a minority. Oh, and there's the religious thing with using free software, that's nice to me and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
So when you look at the landscape, the single biggest obstacle appears to be document formats.
And really, I know that's not even much of a concern. We already rely on the MS document formats as being the default. Maybe if ODF is so good we should consider switching our default formats now. Maybe that should be the first step in our migration. I could care less who came up with the document standard as long as the documents open and do what I expect them to do.
----- obSig
I'm sure there would be plenty of folks who would PAY for it and use it. Individuals and Businesses.
But they don't because that would eat into their proprietary OS cash cow.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
... but it's a lie. Office 2007 and Vista have very low adoption rates and Vista is looking more like a failure every day.
People care about being able to read public documents five years after they were created, ODF has only begun to fix that problem and it's adoption is far better than anything previous, except ASCII. There have been a few legal setbacks, but the momentum is really on ODF's side.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards.
Oh, you mean like ODF, which has been adopted by every one except M$? How often do you see IBM, Sun, FSF, Gnome, KDE, etc, etc, agree on a document format?
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly
You are right. I don't see anything but free software as competitive in the future. There won't be a monopoly, duopoly or anything similar. There will simply be a competitive market.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Is it game over for OpenDocument? Probably. We've been expecting Massachusetts ITD to publicly revise its open formats mandate to include Office Open XML (OOXML) ever since Louis Gutierrez resigned as CIO in early October 2006. That was as clear a signal that ODF had failed in Massachusetts as needed by anyone in the know"
.. same thing ...
How can you equate political machinations with the the technical merits of a document format. If OOXML was so technically superior then why did MS need to get the decision to go with ODF reversed and Peter Quinn effectivly FIRED.
Yea I know, they just cut his funding and ignored his recommendations
davecb5620@gmail.com
Well my shiny mac came with a sh*te ass trial version of MS Office... I"m a student, and even with the amazingly crap student discount I'm not going to fork out money that could be better spent on drugs n rock n roll and all the other Amazing Studenty Activities of Wonder. So I downloaded OpenOffice instead (actually downloaded OpenOffice and then the native aqua NeoOffice which makes it that much nicer to use). So yes, I'll convert documents into MS file formats when submitting sh*te but otherwise everythings just saved in ODF. Really if OpenOffice plays it's cards right and actively targets them, it can get a whole generation of students quietly using it instead of MS simply because we like to drink.
Here is an interesting story for you.. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm
...are incredibly standard as documents, which is almost all created in Word. They're however not standard at all as output format for other software. I'm hoping ODF will become the editable output format, in many ways like PDF is the non-editable one (yes, I know you can edit PDF files but I've hardly seen anyone do it). Need to edit together three reports from different software? All output to ODF, edit in application of choice, save/export. It has a lot of potential a little bit "outside the box" of MS Office.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In the past this has meant "whenever a competing product looks like it is gaining parity with Word"
This is completely unacceptable for a long-term document archive solution. It's not an open format, so you have to rely on Microsoft making "converters" for older iterations available, or reverse engineering. In addition, you have to realize that since the formation is closed, your reverse-engineered implementation may not correctly handle some "features." And that when MS decides to change things, your solution may not correctly handle the new "improved" format.
Not that Microsoft would intentionally break compatibility, of coure... What is it that the Office team says? "RTF isn't done until OpenOffice won't run"
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This headline/article like many others bashing Microsoft/promoting open source ignore the simple fact that companies will never, ever switch to something that does not provide tech support. Regardless of how good/bad it is or how needed, it will not happen.
Can we agree on "that only computer literate people will try, or people who have a computer literate in reach who decides it for them"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1) Save as PDF.
2) Price - it's free
I have convinced several people to try OOo and they all seem to think it's better than paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office. The ones buying new PCs all plan to just use OOo - at least until they see a tangible need to buy MS. The PDF export is actually viewed as a really great feature by more people than I ever thought would care.
If not, I don't completely understand your situation. I'm going to assume that you have Linux at home, MS at work, and a Mac. If so, you could use OO.o or Abiword on all 3 (and maybe Kword - I don't know).
If you were talking about 3 different people with 3 different tastes, then it all makes sense.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I think you're all overlooking something important here. Regardless of whether Microsoft wins the battle against ODF, they've already left the door open for OpenOffice and other products. Why? Because in order to plug OOXML as the supposedly "open" standard, they had to document it and not patent it. Compared to the ridiculous amount of energy that had to go into reverse-engineering doc/xls/ppt, this makes life much easier for the free world. Even if OOXML ends up becoming dominant (I refuse to ever call it a standard), we still win.
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(This was posted on Firefox 2.0 on an IBM Thinkpad, standard at the firm I work for)
I believe the grandparent is talking more about custom Intranet sites, rather than Internet web sites. A lot of these were written in the '90s when ActiveX was all the rage. ActiveX security isn't a problem on the Intranet, since you're only running trusted code (it's effectively a simple way of deploying small Win32 apps) and it's faster than Java (since it's just native code). Now, a lot of people seem to be doing the same thing with .NET.
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There are other reasons why businesses ignore firefox - application compatibility.
.doc and .xls formats basically are "core dumps" (at least that is how they literally started out as--a raw binary image dump of the data segments of the applications). The convoluted binary nature of these files, along with the past security threats of macro viruses, there is a growing number of email servers out there set up to block .doc and .xls attachments. My own employer's policy is to prefer the use of PDFs over .doc for external correspondence for those reasons among others.
.doc and .xls. With XML, there are a LOT of standard processing tools from many different vendors that can be used to filter XML, and therefore many more defences against malicious use of these formats. Even a convoluted, overly complex and bloated spec like OOXML can be scraped with these tools.
BY FAR the biggest show-stopper compatibility-wise nowadays is due to the (ab)use of ActiveX controls. The use of VBScript instead of Java/ECMAScript is second. CSS rendering issues constitute a lot of incompatibility iss ues, but they are largely NOT show-stoppers, rather they are cosmetic in most cases.
I'm sure there are a lot of IT people in business that would like to move away from IE to Firefox, but it would just be too damn expensive to redevelop critical software to remove the IE-only components.
That depends on how much the company values security. Sometimes the expense is justified.
Some corporations I've encountered have in fact endorsed or even mandated Firefox in the name of security, to contain the security threat posed by ActiveX and VBScript. Those who mandate the use of IE often strictly curtail the use of ActiveX controls. I've encountered situations where legacy technology of my employers' products has to be disabled or re-engineered to work around the concerns the IT managers have with ActiveX. As a side effect the end solution becomes basically cross-browser capable (aside from a small number of cosmetic rendering issues).
The same thing is happening with Microsoft Office formats--it is slowly but surely working against the binary formats right now. Most technical people know that
Now, I'm seeing more spam and other suspicious attachments described as PDF files. I think that XML formats will end up becoming more popular in order to get around these security issues. I know PDFs aren't strictly binary and are open after a fashion, however Adobe massively dominates the viewer/editor market for PDFs, just as MS dominates with
However ODF is technically better, it is open in the real sense and not at the mercy of a single vendor, so if it is marketed and managed properly it has the most potential as a standard. I still fear it may go the way of Beta, however OOXML is stll better than MS' "core dump" binary formats.
Your meds aren't working.
P.S.=> Somehow, JUST SOMEHOW, lol (sarcasm)? I just KNEW that "down mod" was coming & that's ok: I have 50 other posts or more here that were modded "up" for technical excellence reasons, rather than just for "useless karma" anyhow... this one? Was actually just to see this post of mine, laughing @ you Pro-Penguins here, GET THAT DOWNWARD MOD (lol, for something YOU guys put up as a photo of, & the fact you have to live in that man's shadow... point blank!)... apk
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Let's face it, most business and governmental information is administrative and ephemeral. It's not important, and it doesn't change the face of the earth or the lives of its inhabitants. Some of it does (major reports, changes in policy, strategic investments), but the volume of information there is piffling compared with the volume of here-today-gone-tomorrow crud, and major documents tend to be disseminated and recast in many formats.
If they wish to use Microsoft formats, let them. If they end up getting their asses bitten, so be it: they can't say they weren't warned. If it unwittingly affects employees or populations, maybe eventually people will learn about the need to respect information.
We're only at the very beginning of the information age: in a thousand years -- if we last that long -- things may be different, and people will look back pityingly on the savage ignorance of their forebears. We'll all be long since gone, and only a small amount of our information will have survived. Let's concentrate our efforts on making sure it's the important information that makes it, not the unimportant.
Name the retarded company then, so we can all laugh at them thinking they can sue MS for "damages". Idiots like that need to be publicly humiliated, and that "you get to sue" meme needs to be put to bed, because it just doesn't fly with software EULAs and these PHB dweebs need to stop repeating it and insisting their employees believe in that total lie. It's like, you can't work here unless you believe in the tooth fairy! Go ahead, name the cretin and the company! We can't get software fixed until those utter and completely clueless morons get it through their thick heads about reality and suing once you've agreed to those EULAs.
You had to do it for them. They didn't do it on their own.
That article is full of nonsense. MS Word comes still with translators to open older MS and other (Word Star, Word Perfect) documents. They are no longer part of the default install, but are still included. The article you link to implies that this is not the case, and that special means (virtualization) are required to ensure that Office 1997 documents could be opened. This is a case of no one in the loop (customer, reporter, editor) having any knowledge about the issue.
The true issue the article touches on is a very different one than file format. Storage medium is a huge proplem. If I have stuff on 8" floppies, how the hell am I supposed to get it? Zip disks, and floppies of all sizes are in danger of being completely outmoded very soon. How long before CDs go away? Perhaps never, but you never know. Hard drives? Memory sticks? This is the kind of legacy support issue that your article adeptly, albeit shortly, addresses.
Now I have that stupid stonecutters song in my head again, thanks a lot.
...
We doo, we doo,
Seriously people, what's stopping ODF is adoption, and that's only going to get fixed once people adopt it.
There's an advantage now, and it is Sun's ODF plugin for Office, this means you can distribute ODF and expect people to be able to use them
Put your money where your mouth is, if you want more ODF adoption, adopt it yourself. When sharing documents for whatever reason use ODF and if the recipient complaints, you complaint about how his MS office is not up to the date. And that he should install the plugin...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
There is no Pain in using office, it is a good program no matter how much you don't want it to be.
I have got to disagree with you there. I'll address Word 2002 specifically, since we use it most where I work. Considering how long Word has been in development, how expensive it is, and the enormous resources of the corporation that develops it, I think Word is a fairly lousy program.
Word is fine for the basics--typing up a quick letter or doing a simple table. But Google Docs is fine for that too, as is OpenOffice. There isn't much point to paying hundreds of dollars for something that other programs will do for free. So really, the reason to get Word is because of its advanced features.
And these are riddled with flaws. Take the "Track Changes" feature for example. It seems a good idea and is handy in practice. However, often when I am using it, I simply cannot edit parts of the document. I'll stick the insertion point somewhere and start typing. Nothing happens. I have to move the cursor around to another place just so I can insert text.
Footnotes. They wind up all over the place. If I insert a footnote reference on page 14, I want the text to start appearing on page 14, not on page 15. Sometimes (especially when using track changes) the text vanishes into some vortex, where it is not seen on the document at all.
Comments. There is no easy way to move them around. Can't right click on them to copy them to the clipboard.
Those are just the Word frustrations that I can think of offhand. Word frustrations pop up every day when you use it as much as I do on the job. I think word processors are used for many tasks for which they are poorly suited. I'm a geek in my spare time, so if I ran the world I would not use word processors at my job at all; instead I would use a plain-text markup system (xml, LaTeX, whatever) with good old plain text comments rather than the crappy Word feature, and with CVS instead of the quite troublesome "track changes". I don't run the world, so I'm stuck with Word, something which does basic things okay, but sucks at advanced things.
Unfortunately I doubt there is any word processor out there that is better than Word at advanced things. I doubt OOo is any better. Word processors are just used for many tasks for which they simply are not suited. But that does not change the fact that Word is an expensive program whose only distinguishing feature is that it poorly implements many advanced features.
Penny - plain text accounting
Many people made the comparison with Firefox, and while good, it has a major flaw. One big thing thats pushing firefox, among other things, is the fact that IE doesn't work. Its buggy. If IE used an unstandard HTML/CSS type thing that actually WORKS (and used it for over a decade, so WPF and stuff doesn't count), Firefox would have had a much harder time going through. But IE doesn't even have that, and even non-geek (but still techies) have made web pages and hit IE's bugs in the past.
By far its not the biggest reason behind Firefox's momentum, but its one big thing that the whole Office thing doesn't have: MS Office actually works. IE doesn't.
note that this is not linuxworld.com
.DOC and PDF are the standards and will stay that way for a long time. There first must be a shift in applications. For example if Google Docs and OO.org can penetrate the market then you might see a slow shift. If you breakdown the OS by percentages and then the applications within those Operating Systems, you just have a long way to go. OO.org just committed to porting to the Mac. Sure NeoOffice is an alternative, but it has some major weaknesses. But Even if everyone on Mac and LInux switched to OO.org and Google Docs, you will still have a majority of people on windows using Word.
You also have to get the word out. How many non technical people know what ODF is? Not many. How are you going to promote it? The only way you can do this is for big companies to jump on board and make all internal documents ODF and eventually that'll push to outside firms. However, it's not likely in the near term. It does have a chance to creep in when more companies use web service for office suites, but that's a ways off.
That's why they want Word. I wrote my CV in Scribus, and exported to PDF. The agencies came back and asked for a Word copy, I told them there wasn't one, and they asked for one without my contact details on it.
Which is fair enough really, they don't want either side cutting them out. I produced a no-address version of my CV, and they were moderately happy.
Think of it this way there is more than 20 years of kludge in OOXML, and it spans 6000 pages of descriptions (actually more as some are just entries of characteristics and not functional descriptions.) ODF cuts right to the chase, cleans out all the bloat and give a solid across-the board logical base to expand on.
Every so often you gotta re-invent the wheel because the old one just cant handle all the patches., and I think ODF is just the thing.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
As far as I know, every school (including mine) is using MS Office 2003 (for well cheap) or better and every student who cannot afford it is pirating it from other people or getting the student discounted version (for well cheap again).
It's weird to say that pirating is the problem, but I really think that every kid who knows something out there will just get a copy of Word from someone, somewhere, whether it be online or through a friend. Nobody out there is saying "Use AbiWord or Ooo to read it."
And it's very weird to say something like "MS might be gone someday and we may not be able to read the file format" to someone. How can any average person think MS would ever go out of business? You can certainly bring up big companies like Digital and all, but MS will probably not be making their mistakes.
If you have been keeping up with all of the ODF discussions prior to this. ODF is NOT a program, it does not necessarily have to cause you to use a different program than Microsoft Office, it will not make you have to go switch to Linux, and will not make your cyber-wife leave you because you use the "other" format.
Microsoft Office applications could support the ODF format just the same as any other word processing application. It is trying to become a standard, not an application.
Sorta like PDF files. Except it would be an OPEN format instead of a commercially licensed one. You can still read and even write PDF files with many other applications than Acrobat software.
Mass users do not need to migrate to anything, you don't need to buy anything, hell you wouldn't even know Word was using ODF formatting until you went to "File" -> "Save As". (If Microsoft gave up their competing format or at least let Office operate in both formats.)
What it WOULD do however, is make it so that it didn't matter WHICH office suite you used. Whether it be OOo, Microsoft Office, StarOffice, etc. (I know I am missing a bunch) as all of the files would be saved in a common format.
THIS is why people want to see ODF become a success.
Please understand that rallying against ODF on the grounds that it would cause people to dump and relearn everything they know is like rallying against CSV files on the same grounds.
My $.02, and a little late in the discussion, but oh well.
- Toast
You just need a plugin.
The msft shills keep trying to make people think that ODF == OpenOffice. But nothing could be further from the truth.
ODF works with several WPs, including MS-Office. Since ODF is truely open, and WP can use it. This is very different than OOXML is msft only.
That really is just more FUD. New versions of Word don't even handle old word .docs with "zero transcription errors". Every time an organization switches to new editions of MS Office, there are hiccups due to Microsoft's ever-shifting file formats. Plus, the types of errors generally seen with file importing usually do not affect the meaning of the document - they are more commonly things like incorrect indentation, page breaks, etc. People like the author of this article want us to believe the sky would fall if ODF were adopted - I just don't buy it.
Plus, no one is saying that organizations have to delete all of their legacy files - they can and undoubtably would archive everything in case any questions of fidelity arise.
I work as a hotliner for a computer retailer (no, not Dell).
The latest trend on our computers is to bundle them with a trial edition of Microsoft Office (60 days). This doesn't support saving your files it seems, nor priting or anything else even remotely useful apart from viewing documents.
Once we explain customers that they have to pay Microsoft to get a fully functioning version of the program, they almost always ask where to get something else, that works without having to pay for it. I always tell them to try out OpenOffice.org - see if it fits their needs. If it does, great - they've just saved a minor fortune. If not, they can always switch back to paying for MS Office.
Same when the computer is bundled with MS Works, which for some really arcane reason doesn't want to play nice with MS Office.
While I've no feedback from all of the customers that I've advised to try out OO.o, I have heard from several of them that they will never use MS Office again, when their trial version is so "buggy", that you can't even use it properly in the trial period.
Does ODF (well, something other than MS' formats) have a future? I would say it has a big future as long as Microsoft shoots itself in the foot instead of luring customers in with fully functioning/compatible programs.
But maybe that's just me.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Personally I think it issue not with format, but software itself. See, why people are tend to use Google instead of MSN or ASK.com or Yahoo? Simply because it is more efficient. Once you write your own search engine which is better than Google, then you will be either more popular than Google or just hired/bought by Google. :-)
Same thing with ODF: there are simply no good software for that thing. Only OpenOffice.org which is still not as efficient and featured as MS Office. If MS Office would support ODF and run on Linux apart from Windows and Mac, then it would be the best Office suite ever made.
MS Office is better by features it provide. It still has a hell of versions compatibility and proprietary format we have to deal with. It prevents people from automating the output and transforming the content from one to another form. That's right. However, all these things is not what users are usually concerned. We usually point to documents incompatibility and vendor lock. However, people already know these issues, but still are willing to be locked and pay for updates. The question to OpenOffice.org community is: why?
If you are making word processing tools that aren't Web native you are stuck in the 1980's. What is needed is an everyone interface to making documents for the Web.
What is the point of making styles that aren't CSS? Why use hidden formatting codes that aren't HTML? You are re-inventing the wheel, something OSS does even more than Microsoft, which is why everybody pretends that OSS does no such thing, e.g. 500 Linux distributions none of which could beat $3 Windows/Office in China. Now you want me to learn how to convert people's ODF encrypted work into HTML and that's an improvement over converting people's shifty DOC encrypted work? Bull fucking shit.
If you save the user's work Web-native, Microsoft will have no argument, even the most non-technical user is delighted to make Web content, they won't ask for any converters.
For reference, look at Dreamweaver 1, 2, 3. Macromedia had an unexpected thing happen where like half their users came from MS Word and had no design or coding background. These users complained about Dreamweaver being $299 and having no DOC importer, but they were there anyway to do "word processing" and Save Web pages. Today it is more relevant, there is more user content than ever and yet it is truly easier to put a movie on the Web than an essay.
As a coder who makes word processing tools for general use, it is your Responsibility to bring your users into the Web tool chain. You should be saving HTML, CSS, JavaScript to disk or to URL. Wrap it up in a Mac-style bundle if necessary (compare a Mac Widget, a folder with one HTML one CSS one JavaScript that appears as a single icon).
I just don't buy the whole thing about all this "important" data in Word documents and Spreadsheets and such. It's nonsense. I'm sure there are a "few" cases in the grand scheme of things. But 99% of the usage of MS-Office is simplistic, poorly formatted, and information of little long-term value. The stuff that does have long-term value, the value is in the content, not the formatting. You could do a straight text-extraction and have everything that is really valuable. The formatting has no value whatsoever. I call BULLSHIT!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
crossover, with a glass of "wine". ;)
five
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Remember? LANs and internet connectivity were were almost unheard of back in WordStar's day. Your PC was basically a fancy typewriter and calculator, it was truely a "personal" computer.
Now, practically every computer on earth is connected, at least, though email. Proprietary standards make no sense today. In fact, proprietary standards made no sense 10 years ago.
So lets see, has anyone succeeded in making OpenOffice integrate with WorldDox and Amicus V+? I know that World Software and Gavel & Gowns went out of their way to make sure their applications would work properly with MSFT; if i knew that OpenOffice would work in our current production environment, i'd be more than happy to bring a proposal to the head partner of the firm I work at tomorrow morning.
I'm hoping that someone makes a print-to-pdf program that does some mojo to preserve the hyperlinks, but as of yet I've never heard of one, and until I do then OpenOffice (or Google docs, which also works for this purpose) is far better than pdfCreator or whatever.
It's read-only, but you can copy stuff into another program. I didn't look at the EULA; I don't imagine that they're any friendlier when you aren't paying them...
BTW, I haven't tried this myself, and the rating hasn't been confirmed by a maintainer.
Word Viewer 2003 on Wine AppDB:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=53
Excel Viewer 2003 on Wine AppDB:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=53
This is not a signature.
Here's a little anecdote.
A few months ago I applied for a job and got it, with a CV created as an RTF document in OOo and exported to PDF.
In the office, I was able to look over the boss's shoulder and see, in Windows Explorer, the folder containing all the CVs that he had received. There were about a hundred, of which I'd say only a small handful were in PDF, about a dozen in RTF and the rest in Word DOC format. It was interesting to see the distribution, and note that it was one of the PDFers (myself) who had got the job. This was in Melbourne, Australia.
Personally, since the job involved some basic computer skills, I would have stipulated in the advertisement that all CVs must be sent in PDF format, as this would be a simple method of excluding people so dim that they couldn't work out some way of doing so.
I can only say i know of no one in the "enterprise" that uses anything but ms office format.
Having said that, i moved my life to f7 on the desktop and haven't felt terribly inconvenienced by the move (so to speak).
The battle for OSS and linux in AU seems like a hopelessly lost cause though. One client I went out on told me they've got rid of all their unix and moved everything into vmware esx "so we have no unix anywhere anymore". "You know esx is linux right?", "no its not, its running windows". Idiot (But he was a managerial type).
I know of only 2 clients that use linux heavily and in a supprise move semetime a couple of months back one of them (quite large) said "lets go desktop". I was quite shocked and excepted the typical "its a MS licensing cost reduction tactic" and it turned out not to be. The second uses it for servers.
But its a drop in the pond - specially for a country that used to be quite ahead of the game, we've become a nation of sheep now. As for ODF vs OOXML - my god, was the outcome really every in debate? Like MS ever loses those type of battles. MS is the devil in disguise - no wonder managers love it.
The only real threat to M$ office is alternative technologies that require a new learning. I am talking mainly about web based office packages. Most companies haven't standardised on an M$ web based package and don't have staff with any web based office package experience, so they are open to M$ alternatives. Thats why M$ see it as their biggest threat.
ODF will take off in a big way if no one web based office package really rules the roost. It doesn't (at the moment) look like that will happen. People will need a way to exchange documents between Yahoo office and MSN office. The name "ODF" might land up being a casualty; You will get "Google office documents are compatible with Yahoo! office, MSN office and ABC office" not "Google office uses ODF".
Another cool way to create hierarchical TOCs in PDF files is to use pdftex--the /section, /subsection, and similar tags create a collapsible TOC. The only reason I prefer OpenOffice is that you can't copy and paste gobs of text from the web into a LaTeX editor and keep the links intact. If I'm creating my own document from scratch, I'd prefer to use LaTeX. Except for tables. But that tangent is larger than my original point, so nevermind...
So how do you get your excel spreadsheet (with VBA applications), connecting to a database in HTML?
How do you write a document that contains a graph that you can pass around for people to edit the values or change scales in HTML?
The msft shills here want everybody to think this is about OpenOffice vs MS-Office. It isn't. ODF runs of several WPs, including MS-Office.
What this is about is msft protecting their monolopy by forcing msft's own proprietary standard on the world.
Whatever you think about ODF, please understand that the many (most?) of the posts in this discussion are designed to make you think this is an OO vs. ms-office comparison - it isn't.
There is no Pain in using office, it is a good program no matter how much you don't want it to be.
No pain in using MSO is true, if, and only if one does not create documents that have more than one page. Anymore and it will crash. Put three of more graphcis on that page, and it will crash. Write text in several different writing systems, and you probably will get the beloved Blue Screen of Death.
MSO is good for one thing -- its presence indicates that the idiot prefers products that are defective by design.
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
Msft's stacking the deck strategy is working like a charm. Was there every any doubt?
n ao-ao-ooxml-13/
http://blog.softwarelivre.sapo.pt/2007/07/31/diz-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing?
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Who has to keep paying MS anything? I've been using the same copy of Office97 for the past eight years, and have yet to encounter a real life situation where it fails to open a document I want to open. I have never wanted a feature that is available in a more modern word processor and which it lacks. (Of course, these days I only use it as backup for the documents OO.o doesn't open, but still, the point applies...)
Yeah, we all heard that for years. And from technical point of view I agree with you. A bit. But you know what? Format without software is just an empty place. Nobody need .psd if there no Photoshop, right? But why InDesign format is so popular among art designers while almost nobody knows about Corel Ventura? Format matters, for sure. But first users should love the product itself.
Users are not care about format, but about the thingy they run. If OpenOffice.org would be really better than MS Office, I am really sure that people would use that free thing instead to buy costly crap. Thus no future for MS format. However, MS Word and MS Excel are one of the best office suites, hands down. And guess what it leads to...
Me: Mac and Linux user for years. And I use OpenOffice.org. And I had built corporate documentation system, so I know how people are working and the way they do and why they use MS Office and what do they actually care about. But still watching people how they do prefer MS Office over OpenOffice.org. And still watching how CTOs are ditching OpenOffice.org out of their datacenters and companies.
We already did that. We launched our new websites using MOSS 2007. Over $50,000 USD to license an internet-facing server. Not to mention SQL Server licensing and Windows licensing.
Glorified freakin' brochure site, too. Smart decision, that one. Probably be cheaper to write our own CMS from scratch.
I'm an IT architect with a 6000-person company, and yesterday added a clause to an XML repository vendor's contract with us:
This means we can connect any other standard-compliant application to it, and also that if this application breaks that we can replace it with another application of the same function, without changing neighboring applications or interfaces. It prevents that company from choosing Windows-only solutions because they know they will have to fix it for free.
My next step is to also add these clauses to the requirements and contracts of all other applications we buy or develop. For office functionality the obvious choice will be ODF, and this can be edited by several programs: OpenOffice.org, but also MS Office with the SUN ODF plugin. The SUN ODF plugin allows you to set the default office format to ODF. Download it from http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp
Of course, once this ODF office format is our standard, it does no longer matter which application is used to interface with this format. Maybe our Solaris users want to stop using Citrix and MS office (slow combination), and use OpenOffice instead saving us Citrix, MS-office and Acrobat license costs. And maybe our PC users who have very basic editing needs would like to try OpenOffice too, saving more MS-office and Acrobat licenses... I'm sure a few power users will want to keep using the 'real' MS-office, so a 100% migration is unlikely, but 80% of 6000 persons times the licenses is a lot of money, even with corporate discounts. And for those of you who say it will not save us money because you cannot resell licenses, we can at least disable the maintenance fee for the software.
Yeah, I agree. Well, I guess my example was incomplete, but my point remain the same (which you confirmed with your precision): its not as easy to replace Office than IE, because Office works, IE's broken.
I have not seen that happen this Decade. Back in the 90's possibly but from Office 2000+ not at all. I have done some fairly intense word documents with High resolution pictures (300ppi), Charts and graphs from other programs, Semi-transparcy images overlapping others.... All on an underpowered system. Granted it gets a bit bogged down but never had it crashed on me. Perhaps you have some bad RAM?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unfortunately I doubt there is any word processor out there that is better than Word at advanced things. I doubt OOo is any better. Word processors are just used for many tasks for which they simply are not suited. But that does not change the fact that Word is an expensive program whose only distinguishing feature is that it poorly implements many advanced features.
So where word sucks in areas where every other program out there sucks...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=258073&cid =20060401
ROTFLMAO!
APK
ODF definitely has a future. The question isn't about that, it's about when ODF will come the mainstream choice in A) corporate environment and B) in home environment.
For me as software developer one thing hindering ODF adaptation is that there isn't or at least I don't know any APIs that allow me easily create ODF documents. As in example our application can export data to Excel in it's native format. We achieve this by using the excellent Java Excel API. We would add ODF support straight away if there would be same kind of API to create ODS documents. Also as ODS is open and not closed as Excel, there would be probably better support allowing full generation of a documents, i.e. generation of charts, this in fact would lead to a situation where we could add more "intelligence" to generated documents and benefit our users via added automation.
PS. I there is already an working API to generate ODF documents, then please reply and post link a to it.
PS2. Yes, I could also myself look onto ODF format specification and create my own code to generate documents, but as generating ODF documents at least in this time doesn't bring bacon home, and isn't even in the area of my expertise I just would like a ready to use code for it.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
I'm sorry, who actually thinks that MS can stick to a standard when it comes to anything? They will kill this format with bad decisions and inconsistencies. It only looks good now because no one uses it. ODF will become the standard when its the only format that can be relied upon to not screw up your data, about when OOXML hits V2.
You know, even when betamax had the better recording quality, VHS still won out because it was easier to obtain. Widespread access inevitably makes a defacto standard.
45-5F is the new 09-f9