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Google Pleased With ISO OOXML Decision
yogi writes "In a blog post from this Friday past, Google welcomed the ISO decision not to fasttrack OOXML. They also (once again) voiced their public support for the ODF standard. 'Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure ... Google supports one open document format and calls on industry participants to collaboratively work on ODF. With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others and pass onto future generations.'"
I was also pleased with the result. But it's not on freaking Slashdot. What makes Google's opinions newsworthy?
Which is of course what Microsoft must stop at all costs. Also worth remembering is that were the shoe on the other foot, and Google had the business lockin and office suite monopoly Microsoft enjoy, they'd probably protect their proprietary formats at all costs too. So whilst Google's opinion may be aligned with most people here, do remember that they're a company whose sole aim is profit.
This looks like a fortuitous PR stunt to me, I don't doubt that Google like ODF now but we shouldn't forget that Microsoft have been known to be open when they lack market share too.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
At my day job, my officemate just got Office 2007, which he was pleased as punch about... at first. Then he realized that no one else on any platform, using any software, can read Office 2007 files. He might as well write them in crayon, for what that's worth. He can select an earlier format, but then it saves as read-only.
At this point, my endless nudging about this whole Open Document Format thing is starting to make more sense for him. In fact, he'd be pleased to replace Word. However, he and some other co-workers are power Excel users, and are very reluctant to even consider replacing it.
Can anyone out there make a convincing case that Calc or Gnumeric are just as good as Excel, even for advanced users?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Either that or they just embrace the ODF spec, extend it in proprietary ways that won't work in other office suites, and then extinguish it. That way MS Office will read everything but still produce documents that only work properly in Office.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The fast track process does not officially end until after the next ballot resolution meeting (BRM). According to the ISO press release http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070, if Microsoft scrapes together enough support at the BRM, then the OOXML standard will be accepted.
On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn't get the support at the BRM, then OOXML is out of the fast track process and referred back to committee for development.
If google is in full support of the ODF format, why don't they support the ODF file type within its search engine? Try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=filetype%3Aodf+the&btnG=Search
The fast-track process isn't over yet; all ISO has decided is that OOXML didn't pass the initial vote. There's still (probably, unless Microsoft backs down at the last minute) a Ballot Resolution Meeting to come, where the committee looks at all the comments received with the votes and tries to resolve them. If the various national boards decide that the result is good enough and vote for OOXML, it can still become a standard in the near future.
No one will probably read this but here goes anyways. Though I can see that microsoft has a vested interest in its proprietary software and/or platform I guess I am somehow not quite understanding the problem. As one of my engineering textbooks says "A problem well stated is a problem half solved" kettering. So what are the fundamental differences in the standards? Can they be combined? I have heard alot of talk about the ooxml standard being fundamentally flawed. Could someone clarify how? Microsoft itself has backwards compatibility issues. I understand that microsoft wishes to lock in consumers to office and other applications but I don't see an open document format impeding towards that goal. I think it might even make the job easier of programmers working to improve office. I guess I don't understand why we can't all watch the baseball game.
fesaj
TFA itself talks about "not approving the fast-track", which isn't quite the same as "not fast-tracking" OOXML period but is still misleading. (Fancy little Preview button down there. I wonder what it does?)
I, for one, welcome our like-minded, Google-employed brethren with open arms and open document formats!
The game.
Have a look. http://www.google.ca/advanced_search?q=details.odf&hl=en
Are they still the folks who will do no evil? I am beginning to doubt.
One of the reasons Microsoft said that ODF didn't meet their needs was that apparently there was no way to completely map their feature set into it. Not being a file format expert, I'm not going to go through and try to prove this one either way - however, knowing that ODF was basically designed for Open Office (or Open Office designed for ODF, one of the two) and knowing that Microsoft Office has a different (and larger) feature set than Open Office it seems fairly evident that MS would absolutely have to extend ODF in a way that would piss off people here on the /. in order to get their features in. I can just hear the "but it doesn't render right in Open Office Writer so Microsoft must have done something evil" now. How people would expect those features that Open Office doesn't have or that MS Office doesn't have but Open Office does to "just work" when two products with different feature sets are trying to use the same format is beyond me. Sure, they could both just chuck a lot of features and save to the equivalent of an RTF - but it looks like what is really needed is a format that is designed to house a superset of both products features that they can both use. Also a way to expressly define how a document should gracefully degrade if feature xyz is not supported on a certain implementation.
Because 'odf' isn't an actual file extension used for ODF documents...try odt (text), odp (presentation), etc...
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Does anyone have a factual list of Office features that can't map to ODF? I mean, besides "justifying the way Office 97 does", which doesn't meaningfully constitute a "feature".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They don't support any of those either, alas.
WTF are you smoking, yes they do:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=filetype%3Aodt+the&btnG=Search
ODF is as incomplete as OOXML. Google is just playing politics, like everyone else.
The ISO decision to not fast-track this won't be made until the ballot resolution meeting (BRM) in February, where they look at the comments, decide which can be resolved, and re-vote. If it passes that vote (and you can be sure MSFT is working on that), the fast-track succeeds. The ISO press release that TFA links to explains this. (I guess someone at Google has reading comprehension issues.)
It ain't over yet.
-- Alastair
Thanks for the correction. That works with any filetype (try it), but their Advanced Search form only covers certain types (PDF PS DWF KML KMZ XLS PPT DOC RTF SWF).
Embedding fully editable text/spreadsheet/images/databases/presentations/cad drawings and links into one file.
Makes it handy to just give someone one file that contains the entire project. I like creating power point slides where everything is embedded into it. Marketing info slide linked to a spreadsheet containing the data and charts, a list of budget items containing product codes/descriptions/pictures linked to an embedded database that is easily updated and cad drawings showing where all the budget items and stuff go. (This is very useful for encapsulating projects such as new condos, hospital renovations, highways and bridge rehabilitation and construction etc.)
Except only certain file types get properly identified and parsed into html. The fact that it's not in the drop down list is a minor problem likely due to the relative lack of popularity of these formats right now.
Enough with these stupid word processors and their stupid formats, real men do it in LaTeX.
Wow. You embed everything? Do you just hand people a CDROM?
Our company put a 10MB CAP on email attachments, which put an end to that practice. Files get too big, too fast.
In other words, this claim of Microsoft's is just spin.
There is a Sun plugin for Microsoft Office that saves the in-memory document from Office as an ODF file. AFAIK it does a very good job. If there was any significant shortcoming of the ODF format, you would think that there would be significant data loss.
The design of ODF started in December, 2002, and it was approved as an ISO standard in November, 2005. Microsoft sat on the design committee the whole time
If Microsoft wanted a particular feature to be supported in ODF, they could have just said so. At any time
Even now, the ODF standard (unlike OOXML) is designed to be extensible.
Have you looked at ODF at all? It allows everything you say, and then some. An ODF document, regardless of how the word processing, spreadsheet, and graphics components are embedded into each other, is all one file (basically a zip file).
OOXML was designed by microsoft to be directly compatible with binary document formats. (.doc). This saved microsoft months and months of coding and testing.
In general, OOXML as xml based format is pretty much useless. Many tags are one letter sized and totally unintuitive. Sure, it does it's job well, but you will need a proper editor for that.
Dear lord, Google doesn't like something from Microsoft? You are kidding me? Really? Quick, post it on slashdot! Venor piss match. Been there, done that. Post some friggen news for crying out loud you bone head editors.
Normally I use OpenOffice.org Writer to edit documents. But I decided to try KWord from KOffice, since it is much faster.
But KWord can't export to PDF (it can use KDE's "print to PDF" option, but my printing is kind of broken when I'm not at home). So I saved in OpenDocument format, and imported into Writer. No love - the formatting is totally broken! I tried to load into AbiWord, but it doesn't understand OpenDocument format at all.
In the end, I saved it as Microsoft Word document - which all 3 programs load and save more-or-less accurately.
Wow... how amazing is it that Google, an MS competitor, welcomes any roadblocks to a standard created by Microsoft! Quite shocking, really. Who would have imagined it?
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