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Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Released, Supports ODF Out of the Box
shutdown -p now writes "On April 28, Microsoft released service pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Among other changes, it includes the earlier-promised support for ODF text documents and spreadsheets, featured prominently on the 'Save As' menu alongside Office Open XML and the legacy Office 97-2007 formats. It is also possible to configure Office applications to use ODF as the default format for new documents. In addition, the service pack also includes 'Save as PDF' out of the box, and better Firefox support by SharePoint."
Now we're gonna get the swine flu spread all over from the flying pigs.
Office SP2 seems to have speeded performance on my machine, but the Outlook junk mail filter is nuts -- it swept up 10 or 12 senders I've been getting for years with no issues in Outlook or Gmail. To compound the problem, Outlook still doesn't automatically move a junk message to Inbox after you click "Add to safe senders list". I can't understand why I have to go through two procedures to move a "safe sender" from junk to inbox.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
IE8, Office 2007 SP2. Only difference is that it works in Firefox.
It supports office documents all the way back to the Roman Empire? Cool.
April 1st was more than a month ago.
Now having PDF as a "native" option (and , as a minor option, odf as well) without installing extra software , this is a real winner. Good work.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I will not trust this move for a few years, until it is clear that Microsoft is not entering the usual embrace/extend/extinguish cycle. There is a lot of room for that in ODF...
Palm trees and 8
Non-free software will make great progress in satisfying the technical needs of its users including adding features introduced by free software. For example, Office 2007 SP2 now supports, in some form, ODF. The fact that it isn't free software still remains a liability when it comes to user freedom and to software progress in general.
Does your support of free software end when non-free software has the features you've come to enjoy?
Like AcidTest for browsers, is there a standard test that will test the export/import compliance with standards for the Office documents? Mod me paranoid, but I am worried Microsoft will implement ODF export/import deliberately in a buggy way to damage the reputation of the ODF format.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
After MS Office 2007 SP1 was never compatible to CrossOver I hope SP2 will get that soon. The shop I am working for only uses Microsoft Office 2007. They are trained to use it. OpenOffice will not work, because they would need retraining. But I need to maintain their computers. And it would so much easier to do if I could just switch them over to Linux. I also need the Service Pack, because without it the mailboxes in Outlook 2007 are limited to 2GB. Those people send and receive large Powerpoint presentations on a daily bases. They also keep those mails for reference. Some of their mailboxes are about 4GB and growing.
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/group/?app_id=5133
So, in all seriousness, now, aside from price (free, unless you count 'retraining) - what need for OpenOffice?
Save as PDF was supposed to be a feature in Office from the beginning, but Adobe objected (legally) and forced them to pull it, so MS offered it as a separate download. I wonder why Adobe decided to drop their objection to MS putting this is Office.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Small as it may seem, a major victory has been won, here.
Ever notice that the price of MS Office exceeds the price of the rest of the computer? Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented. But, by commoditizing the document format with open standards, this has the effect of requiring Microsoft to compete on real terms - stability, usability, features, price - rather than by effective lockout through underhanded OEM de3als and shady use of their Monopoly status.
This is a very, very good thing for everybody. (Even Microsoft - if they aren't forced to compete on real terms, they will atrophy and wither, eventually losing their monopoly and going the way of DEC)
As always, the ball's not out of the park yet, we must remain ever vigilant and work to preserve a competitive marketplace....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I am the type of user who types it first, then makes it pretty. Too often in the past going back to WordPerfect5.1 for DOS days, the darned program would try to guess what I wanted to do next and force different styles on me. i.e. bullet points.
Having to stop what I am doing and FIX the errors that computer has made is complete regression in UI design, and 10+ years later they still have not learnt.
So now all of my data input happens in nano. I use OO as needed, as opposed to more regularly.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
This is MS's step 1:
Embrace.
Anybody know what the other two are?
Just to clarify, SP2 adds support for OpenDocument Text, not all OpenDocument, no spreadsheets, no presentations, etc. etc. It is a good step, but everyone must know it, if not MS will just say "we support OpenDocument" to all institutions and countries that requires ODF support.
Well it's about fucking time.
Regular users of Office 2007 and OpenOffice know that Office 2007 isn't merely superior "in some senses". It's in almost every sense, as long as you have a relatively modern computer.
And boy does it suck at that. We tried it out, and it is extremely unimpressive. Tracked changes are gone when you save to ODT, nested tables from ODT often lose their text, and object positioning is often wrong. Generally speaking, anything more than simple letters requires manual intervention.
Did they just repurpose the open source converter they commissioned? It certainly is the worst filter I've seen from Microsoft in a long time.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Which version of ODF? 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2?
I am assuming 1.0 because that is the officially sanctioned standard.
The format OpenOffice uses can be adjusted in Tools>>Options>>Load/Save>>General
How the shit did you get modded +2 Insightful? You're completely wrong. MS Office 2007 SP2 adds ODF support to Word, Excel and PowerPoint to read and write ODT, ODS and ODP respectively.
Why can't you select text in a PDF?
Because the PDF has been saved with the "copy to clipboard" permission turned off.
MS will simply provide a message box triggered by every ODF save which will warn that the file format selected may not save correctly. With no more information than this, most will just revert to DOCX, or some "safe" MS format, and that will be the end of it. Of course, MS will reap the advantage of offering the capability of opening ODF files, which will mostly be converted back to the "preferred" DOCX format at the first coerced save. La.
I've looked at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=953195 as well as the technical details but didn't see anything mentioned.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
It runs on Linux?
Both Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org can run on Linux on x86, the former under Wine. But I will admit that once the subnotebooks with an ARM Cortex CPU come out, OpenOffice.org will have the advantage that it also runs on Linux on ARM.
...to see all of the "improvements" Microsoft will make to ODF. Why I'll bet that within three years we won't even be able to recognize it... or inter-operate with it!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Just to clarify, SP2 adds support for OpenDocument Text, not all OpenDocument, no spreadsheets
Microsoft generally doesn't implement other standards bodies' "draft" specs until they're finalized (e.g. "standard" or "recommendation"). OpenFormula, an extension to OpenDocument that describes how to recalculate a spreadsheet, is still a draft.
If it takes two service packs to support something, how does that rhyme with "out of the box"?
I can agree with "Microsoft Office supports ODF with two major patchsets". If it did it OOTB, it would have done so at release - as in, ohidon'tknow - out of the box.
I'd honestly expect the standard bastardised version of other competitions software that is usually produces. Their either heavy pot-smokers or just love being evil like google does.
I hate Microsoft Office 2007's ribbons as much as any other hater, but my other problem is the incompatibility between MSOffice03's .doc and MSOffice07's implementation of .doc.
Has this been fixed yet? Can I edit/save/etc my .doc files in MSOffice07 as if it were MSOffice03, and not have to worry? Or is that backwards "compatibility" still broken beyond reason?
If this hasn't been fixed yet, then Microsoft has no business adding additional functionality to the suite. Why do they refuse to fix their software before adding new features?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Damn, good thing OpenOffice doesn't do this with .doc files. Oh wait...
Is there an option to turn that stupid crap off and go back to the legacy interface?
If not? Not interested.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is the same thing Microsoft does for everything that threatens it:
Step 1 (embrace): Microsoft accepts and supports the new technology
Step 2 (extend): Microsoft adds its own product to the technology
Step 3 (extinguish): Microsoft ends support for competitors technology, putting the competitors out of business and leaving Microsoft in control of the new technology.
Yeah, but that's because the MS standard is closed (as much as M$ likes to say it's open). MS has no excuse not to properly render an open format that's actually open.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
A few years ago, official Microsoft spokespeople were telling reporters that it was not technically possible to make document converters for reading and writing the OpenDocument format. It made me rather angry.
I just did some Google searching, and didn't find any primary sources, but here's a blog posting that summarizes what they were saying:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2075
And what do you know, it is technically possible after all.
P.S. At the time, one of the reasons I thought this was so dumb was the blindingly obvious point that if MS Office supported ODF, then when governments or businesses standardize on ODF, they can still buy MS Office. Now, instead of spending resources on trying to fight ODF, they can just focus on selling Office as an ODF solution.
So, points to Microsoft for finally doing the right thing for the right reasons. (IMHO they are still in karmic debt over this issue.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"supports...out of the box" and "service pack two" do not belong in the same headline.
After you get office 2007 out of the box, you have to go through two service packs to get ODF support.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But then, they're not a monopoly, so there's no problem there.
Should be simple enough to check. Has anyone downloaded the SP?
Open Office is free software which respects you as the user so that if you have a problem you can fix it yourself.
This is a pipe dream.
Sun's financial troubles left OpenOffice.org with a full time staff of about 24 developers.
OpenOffice.org has from the beginning been staffed, funded and managed by Sun with very few significant contributions from outside the company.
OpenOffice.org is notoriously one of the most unwieldy and opaque blocks of legacy code on the planet.
The Office Suite is a core application.
You can't tell your boss that the dog ate your homework.
That your sums don't add up. That your slides won't slide or your pages won't print.
Just finished quick testing ODF Text conversion of some Architecture/Deign documents of medium to high complexity (Word 2003) and I have to say the results are good. All of the documents converted to ODF in no time, Word 07 SP2 opened the converted documents quickly and to my shock the ODF document looked exactly like the original (that is no immediately visible glitches - haven't spend reviewing line by line as these are huge documents). More joy came when OO3.0.1 opened the converted documents just fine - no compatibility issues there, the documents even looked great in OO. So seems to me like Microsoft has done a great job with ODF conversion - this might take us one step closer to having a truly interoperable document format (alas we still need Word to author complex documents in the enterprise for its collaboration features and other integration stuff).
Word SP2 supports OpenDocument Text, Excel supports OpenDocument Spreadsheet, and Powerpoint supports OpenDocument Presentation
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
They finally fixed the fucking calendaring bugs that have been haunting me for the last few months since upgrading to Exchange 2007.
Exporting from Access to Excel is another big one I can see some of our users enjoying.
The built in PDF printing is just icing on the cake. Saves me from having to deploy CutePDF with standard images now.
"filename.docx" may contain features that are not compatible with this format. Do you want to continue to save in this format?
[checkbox]Don't show this message again.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Just to clarify, SP2 adds support for OpenDocument Text, not all OpenDocument, no spreadsheets, no presentations, etc. etc. It is a good step, but everyone must know it, if not MS will just say "we support OpenDocument" to all institutions and countries that requires ODF support.
Your post is so wrong, I had to put it into pictures
they deliberately used the older 1.1 version of ODF since there is a bunch of "interesting" bugs in the spec
(it writes out deliberately broken spreadsheets as an example) if i had to i would still install the sun odf plugin
if i needed support
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented.
The legacy binary formats have been documented for a while as well.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx
I prefer the ???x ones; easier to search and typically smaller due to being automatically zipped.
As for obsolete? They're not a bad design considering the low-end of hardware people would have had around 1996-1997 and needed to support forward compatibility from even older formats then. And it's arguably a feature for interoperability that they didn't get any breaking changes for a decade.
You could do a lot in Word 97. I remember trying to use WordPerfect to write a screenplay around that time, and their code scheme simply couldn't scale to a couple hundred pages with dozens of style changes per page. When I converted to .doc and Word, the file was about 20% the size and performance had to be 10x faster.
Yes, it was on a 80 MHz computer, but heck, some people were stuck with 80 MHz computers back then.
My video compression blog
Did you actually, um, read the error message?
Oh right, users never read the messages, just like /.'ers never rtfa.
It's not that MS won't render ODF properly, but a document created in docx may not have analogous functionality if saved in odf. That is, they are not feature for feature inter-compliant standards.
Imagine that.
Regards.
I know what the submitter intended.
So the second service pack to a product released in Nov 2007 constitutes "out of the box" for a 1.0 standard from Feb 2007, or the 1.1 from Feb 2008...or 1.2?
"Out of the box" just seems a poor choice. 2 years later after much feet dragging, an international debacle, trying to kill or commandeer it several times...etc. This seems more like a concession/defeat admission.
Better late than never? Now make it the default save format please...though that might be like signing your own death warrant. Too much to ask I suppose.
Ever notice that the price of MS Office exceeds the price of the rest of the computer?
Ever notice how important clerical work is to any business? How difficult it is to improve productivity in any significant way?
The geek is obsessed with trivia.
OEM sales. File formats. The price of the hardware.
The only thing which really matters - and the roots of Microsoft's dominance - is how well you understand office work, the office environment.
The office worker.
that's hot
What your post means is: if software supports a file format in a way which is incompatible with the the most widely used applications for that format, it is OK as long as it conforms to the published standards. Your post ignores the fact that the whole point of this kind of support is to encourage interoperability, not pedantry.
So, to turn the tables, no matter how differently FOSS software support MS proprietary formats compared to MS's applications, this is OK as long as they conform to all information which MS has published about their formats? Most FOSS developers, and even more FOSS users, disagree.
Embrace - Extend - Extinguish
^
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SP2 Released, Supports ODF Out of the Box
It doesn't really support ODF out of the box if it takes two service packs to do it now, does it?
/* No Comment */
That message is not shown when you're trying to open an ODF document, it's shown when you're trying to save an ODF document, and that's because some kinds of formatting that you can do in MSOffice are, apparently, not properly representable in conformant ODF (though perhaps they could be represented via extensions that OpenOffice could understand... but MS decided to make it a strictly conformant implementation). Hence the warning. You get the same one if you try to save as binary .doc; furthermore, there's a checkbox on the dialog that lets you disable it once and for all.
Fantastic. Now how about ANY support for ODF with Office 2008 for the Mac?
So what happens, if you install SP2 and have the Sun ODF Plugin for MS-Office already installed? Clash of the Titans?
Strict compliance seems to be a new Microsoft strategy: look at their dogged adherence to CSS 2.1 standards in IE8, including adding a formidable number of new CSS tests to the W3C test suite. It's hard not to suspect that they're up to something, but I don't think anyone has quite nailed what it is yet. With ODF, at least, it seems they are obliged to follow the spec to the letter.
Microsoft's strict compliance probably a good thing if it forces other developers to bring their apps more into line with the specs (although it will be interesting to see how OO copes with legacy documents while sticking to the spec).
Assuming MS Office is written in C/C++, producing a version for ARM would be little more than a 'simple' recompile.
But then how would Microsoft convince the major third-party publishers of plug-ins for Microsoft Office to recompile their products for ARM?
Then use a pdf viewer which ignores that setting?
I'd have to hire a lawyer first.
Well, its for their future version of Office, Office 2010 will be MS's version of EMACS!
Awesome. I can finally ditch Outlook and start using Gnus to talk with the corporate Exchange server at work.
Monkey$oft HAS thrown a useability spanner in the ODF works. The problem is, when you open up an ODF email attachment or double click an ODF file, Word SP2 automatically converts it to a .docx (breaking stuff in the process). If you want to save it back as an ODF you have to 'Save As', something your average user couldn't do if their life depended on it. If you manage to do that the broken .docx is converted back to a broken ODF. The only way that works properly is, open word, 'File'>'Open', select your ODF. When you save this time everything is fine.
What's new about this? Embrace, extend and extinguish!!!
Now we only need Apple to start supporting the OpenDocument file formats. Saving content in Apple's proprietary format is IMHO a bigger risk than going the .doc or .docx way.
Has anyone posted this yet? http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html In it they test ODF-spreadsheet compatibility across different applications including offcie 2007 sp2. Interesting read
MS Office 2007 is the world's greatest productivity killer. It is much easier to move from Office 2003 to Open Office than to Office 2007. I don't know who thought that it was an innovation. The only thing it does is force us to learn the keyboard shortcuts, because the menu system is horrible compared to Office 2003. I cringe every day when I get to work and am forced to battle this beast.
One has to wonder how you think anyone would be able to implement the OOXML standard, in any way which will be interoperable with Microsoft's implementation, if and when MS gets around to releasing it.
Perhaps you should have addressed the point of my post (which is that to be interoperable, you have to have that as your goal) instead of merely calling me names?
> I see.
We all see --- what we want. If you want me to change my point of view, you'll have to do a bit more work. In this case, probably a lot more work. My mind boggles at someone who thinks that Microsoft really, really wanted to implement ODF v1.1 in a way which would improve interoperability (and therefore damage Microsoft's business interests) but merely because of problems in the standard they got it wrong.