Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Pleased With ISO OOXML Decision

Posted by Zonk on from the it-pleases-the-goog dept.

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.'"

2 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. OOXML... what's the point? by greenguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:OOXML... what's the point? by Aminion · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have a similar story about MS Office (in)compatibility.

      A couple of weeks ago, I opened a PowerPoint 2003 file in PowerPoint 2007 (this loads PPT's compatibility mode), did some changes to the presentation and saved. Well, I tried to save when PPT complained that the changes that I've made to slides 1-12 weren't compatible with PPT 2003. Did I mention that the presentation only had 12 slides? Yeah, so no save for me. And what were those difficult to save changes? I changed the damn slides' design to one of the new fancy ones. That's all. I find it a bit ridiculous that not even MS can't make PTT 2007 compatible with previous versions.