Office 2007SP2 ODF Interoperability Very Bad

David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won't read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."

Comments

Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office

[MrKaos]

Sun's ODF plugin for Office.

Re:They also claim Windows supports Posix

[drinkypoo]

Microsoft Windows is POSIX.1 compliant, which will not help anyone today but which is nonetheless true.

Re:What did we expect?

[EvilAlphonso]

nobody would have believed that Microsoft was the good guys.

Actually there was a time when Microsoft was hailed as the white knight in the shiny armor freeing us from the evil IBM empire.

Re:They also claim Windows supports Posix

[OrangeTide]

Well if you just go for the basic level of posix support, then yes it does support it. So does 100 other OSes, including weird embedded OSes that can't even run executables. Everything has to be compiled in, but they are "POSIX" too.

To be far UNIX Services for Windows is pretty decent and gives you a very complete POSIX environment on Windows.

Re:What did we expect?

[mhesd]

From the article:

The irony here is that the formula language used by OpenOffice (and by other vendors) is based on that used by Excel, which itself was not fully documented when OpenOffice implemented it. So an argument, by Microsoft, not to support that language because it is not documented is rather hypocritical. Excel supports 1-2-3 files and formulas and legacy Excel versions (back to Excel 4.0) neither of which have standardized formula languages. Why are these supported? Also, the fact that the Microsoft/CleverAge add-in correctly reads and writes the legacy ODF formula syntax shows not only that it can be done, but that Microsoft already has the code to do it. The inexplicably thing is why that code never made it into Excel 2007 SP2.

Re:What did we expect?

[Locutus]

Actually there was a time when Microsoft was hailed as the white knight in the shiny armor freeing us from the evil IBM empire.

I've heard this said, but somehow I managed to miss it. I started work in the industry in 87, and had first encountered microsoft probably in 84. Outside of ziff-davis style vanity press, everything about MS was about what crap they were technically and ethically. The white knights were DEC, BSD, Borland, Commodore, ...

It was pretty obvious to many techies by the early 90s that Microsoft software was crap. The printed press was one of its tools and perpetuated the myth that companies would be better off with Microsoft. By 1995 it was getting out to a more general crowd how bad Microsoft was but these people still required having their eyes and minds open. Considering where they are today, it's obvious many are still pretty ignorant to their business practices and technology in general. By 1995, even the author, Douglas Adams saw this:

Microsofthttp://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/dna-on-microsoft.html

Here's a quote from the end of that short article:
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place."

Over $200 million in marketing spent on Window 95 and about the same amount the following year pushing NT as _the_ server OS suckered in enough to seal their position in the market. That seal is leaking now but unfortunately, the general population of computer users and IT execs are mostly just as naive as they were in the early 1990s. It's the OEM's who are driving the market now because of very low margins and the high relative cost of Microsoft software.

LoB

The Microsoft formulas aren't actually conformant

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's supposed ODF 1.1 spreadsheet output is not compliant with the ODF 1.1 specification.

From 8.1.3 (emphasis mine):

Typically, the formula itself begins with an equal (=) sign and can include the following components:
[...]
Addresses of cells that contain numbers. The addresses can be relative or absolute, see section 8.3.1. Addresses in formulas start with a "[" and end with a "]".

From 8.3.1 Referencing Table Cells (emphasis mine):

For example, in a table with the name SampleTable the cell in column 34 and row 16 is referenced by the cell address SampleTable.AH16. In some cases it is not necessary to provide the name of the table. However, the dot must be present. When the table name is not required, the address in the previous example is .AH16.

Now look at a Microsoft formula in their ODF 1.1 spreadsheets. You'll see a formula attribute value of "msoxl:=B4-B3". For that to be correct per the ODF 1.1 specification, that should be "msoxl:=[.B4]-[.B3]". Compare this to the OpenOffice.org and OpenFormula syntax:

msoxl:=[.B4]-[.B3]
  oooc:=[.B4]-[.B3]
      of:=[.B4]-[.B3]

Ignoring the prefix, they're identical. Furthermore, the formula functions used by OpenOffice.org are generally based on the functions in Excel to begin with (such as "TODAY", for example), so I can only conclude that Microsoft is intentionally sabotaging interoperability to keep people from using ODF while still claiming conformance.