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Microsoft Accuses Google Docs of Data Infidelity
Hugh Pickens writes "For years Google has been pitching migrations from Microsoft Office to Google Docs, arguing that Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better because users can store Microsoft Office documents in Google's cloud and share them in their original format. Now eWeek reports that Alex Payne, director of Microsoft's online product management team, says that moving files created with Office to Google Docs results in the loss of data fidelity, including the loss of such data components as charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, and SmartArt. 'They are claiming that an organization can use both seamlessly,' Payne writes. 'This just isn't the case.' Meanwhile, Google defended its original 'Docs makes Office better' in a statement, noting that it has made a lot of improvements to the web editors in Docs with its recent refresh, and promising that functionality will only get better as Google integrates the DocVerse assets into Docs. 'It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products,' says a Google spokesperson."
I actually have to agree with you on this one. The same problems exist (or existed) with OOo formats IIRC (I haven't used docs in about 2 years, so things may have changed) and they have always been open.
This is one case where Google's claims of "good enough" just don't make the grade.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Even while the file formats are open now
Really? Please point me to the relevant reference for the Office 2007 file format. And don't even think about saying anything related to OOXML because its not even close.
That's because the formats are 'open' in the sense that they are poorly documented and difficult to implement. Opening your formats is one thing - assisting others to actively achieve interoperability is another
Well, if true, I guess you could count my (rather large) organization as one that would never used Google Docs. Tracking changes alone is a feature used extensively by our business departments.
I honestly don't think any web-based document system will can compete with MS Office (desktop version). If you've ever worked for any type of large business lately, word processing is WAY past the basic formatting options I've seen in any online suite.
On the one hand, it seems anyone who's ever used a computer before in their life would half-way expect this sort of incompatibility to arise, given the drastically different natures of Google Docs and Office (Web based vs standalone app).
On the other hand, how often do the people Google is trying to cater to actually use these features? Google Docs has always struck me as a quick and easy way to get Word documents from anywhere. And I've gotta say, not many of my office reports use fancy styles, or SmartArt. Charts occasionally, yes, but the rest of those items just strike me as "meh" and SmartArt particularly strikes me as "yeah, that was cool when I was seven."
I dunno. It just doesn't seem to me like this is going to be a problem in common usage.
The unfortunate thing is that teachers and professors all see the student issues due to the failure of the MS products, yet continue to insist on their use, blaming it on the incompetency of the students rather than the incompetency of MS.
MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents(This does not include most educational places). Otherwise, at least for documents, OO.org, Google docs, or LaTeX should be the norm. For spreadsheets OO.org, and especially Google, has some stuff lacking. For presentations, I think everything but Keynote pretty much sucks.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So this basically just states that Google Doc's data fidelity is only as good as Google makes it. So the only question businesses have is "Are Googles data fidelity policies better maintained than our own".
If yes, use it, if no, stay internal.
What Microsoft has to do with that question other than warping the question into an assumption to fear i sure dont know.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Still, Google shouldn't be talking that trash until Docs renders at least as well as OpenOffice does. It's seems that quality and fidelity take the back burner to data-mining.
(Rolls eyes while Openoffice insults pour in)
Open formats? From MS. That's a paradocs! They can't even faithfully render some older versions of their own stuff accurately.
"'It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products,' says a Google spokesperson.""
While M$ bashing is commonplace here I really think this attitude towards them is short-sighted as hell. Office is one of the one things I'll give credit to Microsoft for doing fairly decently. They're a for-profit software company, don't forget that.
Microsoft's approach involves selling software and client retention. That's not even something I could call evil in the same terms that google seems to be claiming. You want free? You lose functionality. That seems perfectly reasonable.
Google, however, is an advertising company, not a software company. Will they offer a product that doesn't in some way use your data for their means? I highly doubt it.
Henceforth - google's argument is similar to ford being angry that they can't use a honda engine in their vehicles while also admitting they have a superior product.
I see students failing papers because the Word on one machine does not read word files created on another machine in a different version.
And this is why my resume is in PDF format.
Because you know damn well that the moment Google Docs achieved true fidelity with MS Docs, then MS would turn around and change the specs again, thereby breaking fidelity...
C|N>K
Wow, Microsoft is really digging deep on that one. I don't have any problems tracking document changes. We use the strike-through and different colored text for each contributor. So I know at a glance who changed what.
If you need legal change tracking, you're not going to be using web-based software anyway. Besides, if there's a big call for that feature, I bet Google can figure out how to supply it.
I think the days of desktop software are winding down. Google can be far more nimble with Docs than MSFT can be with Office. And the features that the MS guy mentioned, only small minority of users find those at all useful.
Taking a swipe at Google just informed thousands people that you can move .docs around with GoogleDocs. Doesn't seem real bright.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Open formats? From MS. That's a paradocs!
I see what you did there.
'It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products,' says a Google spokesperson"
Which is why I am sticking with Office. Its frustrating and I wish the internet with opendoc was available 15 years ago before MS could lock everyone in but its too late now. If a customer can not read your data in a professional format he/she will think you are incompetent and go with a competitor. If my resume looks unformated it says alot about my professionalism.
Google just stated their own case not to use their product.
You can argue that ... well just have everyone on their Google doc cloud. At the end of the day in business if its a hassle then do not bother doing business where time is limited and everything has to be done yesterday.
http://saveie6.com/
Does Google Docs treat the year 1900 as a leap year?
Microsoft is really really desperate to be blowing this kind of smoke.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"Uh, if Google cannot make their Docs applications compatible with Office formats, how is it Microsoft's fault?"
Because they keep everything a secret - thats been their way of destroying opposition.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Google has too many half-assed projects it cannot or doesn't fully support.
So, exactly the same as Microsoft, then?
... and then they built the supercollider.
From the Technet article:
Now, what if I told you that every time you opened one of these documents in Office it converted this document to a different file format for viewing/editing and that this new converted document actually was missing some of its components (which were there before the conversion). ....snip.... Well, the good news is that Office doesn’t do this.
Call me a skeptic, but I believe Microsoft office products do exactly this. Each version of office does have a different file format, and it is very unclear about which format it is using at any one time: "I saved it as a .doc file" is meaningless because the actual filetype is embedded in some voodoo bytes (or black magic bytes) and the user generally does not care to try to determine what they are actually saving.
Amusingly, the Technet blog entry has text marked as "Calibri" font, with no alternatives. Calibri is a Microsoft-only font that comes with Vista. So non-Vista systems render the text in Times Roman. Calibri is a sans-serif font, and all the other fonts in that Wordpress theme are sans-serif, so the page looks awful.
Now that font downloading works in essentially all the current browsers, that's not necessary, at least if you stick to public-domain fonts. However, there aren't many public-domain fonts that don't suck at small type sizes. (Here's a page of mine with some downloaded fonts.) If you have anti-aliasing on, it looks OK; if not, the text font looks ugly. Interestingly, Linux and Macs do anti-aliasing routinely, but older Windows systems do not.
Google Docs has the same problem. Currently, it works like classic HTML; if you have the font locally, you can use it, but if not, you get some default. The stock fonts in Google Docs are the lowest common denominator: "Normal", "Normal/Serif", "Courier New", "Trebuchet", and "Verdana". If Google is going to make a big push on competing with Word, they need to do better than that. Google could make progress on this by buying twenty or so really good body fonts outright from a major font foundry, and setting them up for download on demand for Google Docs.
When you open a DOCX or DOC file in Google Docs it converts them and Google Docs doesn't have the same functionality either.
But in terms of the data, it's not Google's fault that MS hasn't created an open standard for the document files..
http://www.hawknest.com/
Microsoft has documented all the binary and XML file formats used by office: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118(office.12).aspx
Microsoft openly bragging about trying to enforce lock-in by making formats nearly impossible to implement! That's priceless.
Wake me up when I don't need a windows license to use MS' google docs alternative.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Just edit wherever you want and save it as PDF. If you need RTE, then find something that suits everybody, but that's a different case. Other than that, PDF is, and always will be, my reference format for document interchange.
As to TFA, one can only say "Oh my, Google and Microsoft are fighting!...Go figure."
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
This just goes to show that when you use Microsofts software, you are locked to using their products and their products only. Because the format is closed, other parties will always be playing catchup and can never guarantee 100% compatibility. So Googles snarky comment at the end reveals just how lethal lock-in can be. You are locked in, with no way out.
I can understand that you might resent loosing data in a migration or usage of another tool, but put the blame FIRST with Microsoft and THEN with yourself for having allowed yourself to get locked in.
In any other part of your business, you would avoid lock-in at all costs. Would you tolerate that your floors could only be provided by ONE company and that it means no body else can put in a carpet without it breaking gravity? Would you allow your truck fleet to be provided by only ONE company and have that company know it? A common trick in the trucking branch is when it is time to place a new order is to invite the truck company to your place of business and have a few rival trucks parked in sight. Just a hint that you and the sales rep know there is competition out there.
In IT? You happily invite the MS guy to give you a new deal in your all MS office that can only deal with MS formats... yeah. What is the word in the sales rep mind? Bonus? Sucker?
Governments do this all the time, they give their divisions rules that they must buy from a supplier who has won the bid. And gosh, once they have the bid for the next couple of years, service just goes out of the window. How surprising. Especially when you just know that the quality of service under the previous contract will play no role whatsoever under the new bidding round. Ever wonder why government often does so badly in efficiency? They think lock-in is a GOOD thing. You know how you get good service from a supplier? Make him sweat as to whether your next order will be going to him. It is how the game is played.
Really, take a long hard look at your own company. How certain are you that you can access your own info without aid from a third party? A paper archive is easy. No matter who supplies the binders, you can read it. Tape drives? How certain are you they continue to be compatible? Are your records required by law actually readable? Can you afford to ditch a supplier who doesn't make business sense anymore? Can you get the best deal if the supplier knows you need him?
Why do you think MS sells Windows for ever higher prices? They know they got you by the short and curlies.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The manufacturer of two applications, who claims to cleanly import content from one of these applications to the other, simply has to do better than "nearly identical" when it comes to content.
cb
First of all, the DOC format (the original Word formats) are not open, only DOCX are somewhat open. The problems are in: charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, and SmartArt.
Charts, watermarks, tracked changes and SmartArt are not open/documented in the OOXML formats. Styles and fonts are usually converted pretty well unless the document is generated by MS Office because then it isn't according to spec anymore.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
except if your paying attention MSFT doesn't actually use those documented features, and instead use an older version.
OOXML that ISO passed is different from the OOXML produced by office 2007 and 2010.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This is rich! Microsoft's software has the poorest interoperability capability of all Office Productivity suites.
Why should MS bitch about this when it's own software cannot even open basic documents created in other office productivity suites?
This isn't only OOXML documentation. This is the current versions used by Office 2007, and also documents the older binary versions.
"Uh, if Google cannot make their Docs applications compatible with Office formats, how is it Microsoft's fault?"
Because they keep everything a secret - thats been their way of destroying opposition.
Logic fail.
If I slept with your wife and keep that a secret from you, that secrecy isn't why you can't give her an orgasm.
In the same line of thought, if you sleep with my wife and keep it a secret from me, that secrecy isn't why you can't give her an orgasm either.
I work in a medium size semiconductor company. We use to document chip spec, board parts, software procedures and other stuffs in ms word. Slowly management realised that wiki is best tool for this. Chip spec can be generated from doxygen comments. Any single change in register spec get available to software on fly through automated tools. No single engineer knows all the parts of a board/software procedures so collaboration is must. When you are looking at wiki you are sure that you are looking at most up to date content. Now I hardly open ms word and we don't have google docs.
Maybe Microsoft could pull out the Word file format specification and show us exactly what Google is doing wrong?
Google's Spreadsheet product is actually in some respects superior to Microsoft's. Yes, it doesn't do data pivots or indents (crucial for accounting layouts), but it's integrated with (online, natch) forms and search. I haven't had much call to use Google's "word", but fire up the spreadsheets daily. In the long run, however, I think that Microsoft has hooped itself by valuing customer lock-in over actual innovation. Google will continue to improve its "office" offering, becoming "good enough" for more and more applications.
I'd've thought MS's FUD department would have come up with something better seeing as they're just about to release a competitor to Google Docs - you know, something like a coordinated campaign of spurious patent trolling, adverts etc. But fidelity? Not exactly a rallying cry for the troops. Maybe it's a case of hubris - the MS Office team have had the playing field to themselves for such a long time, they can't really contemplate a successful competitor. Sucks to be them.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
We're suddenly back in 1994, and "the job's not done until WordPerfect won't run!"
you poor, poor guy... you actually believed you were giving her an orgasm?
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
... because you only have to use Google Docs for about 2 minutes to run into commonly-used features from Microsoft Office that just don't exist. I create a chart and I can't format the axes, I can't put in a trend line, I can't copy and paste it into a document. The drawing tools are laughably unsophisticated. Google Docs doesn't offer feature parity with a 1993 copy of Clarisworks, much less Microsoft Office.
I like Google Docs as a handy scratchpad to create documents accessible from anywhere and quickly exportable as PDFs. I have dozens of little things transcribed in it. But production work has to meet standards for fonts, formatting, chart appearance, etc that Google Docs cannot produce. The reality is that Office + Exchange + Sharepoint offers a collaboration environment that is unmatched -- it's an expensive combination, but if you need the features, there is no competitive option. Google's services are light years behind, and OpenOffice is not bad at all (and tantalizingly better than Office in a handful of areas) but the collaboration features are not there.
I stopped using MS word whenever i could when correctly printing a Word document containing equations requiring having loaded the equation editor before printing (otherwise just garbage). Moreover i would imagine that word documents, which contain DDE-Objects (hmm Excuse-me: OLE-Objects) may have some issues when loading them on another Platform.
*And before you ask: yes, i may have some Floppy images with Documents from 1995 on my HD, not touched sinces then; and yes, my Latex documents from back then still compile*
First of all, the DOC format (the original Word formats) are not open, only DOCX are somewhat open.
Oh please! The DOC format is not open in the sense that anyone can contribute. But the documentation of the format is fully available for anyone who take interest. It merely requires a single google: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx
DOCX is fully open. Anyone who wants to contribute is free to do so. You just have to go through ECMA/ISO - just like Microsoft. It is fully described in the ISO standard ISO/IEC 29500. The standard is freely downloadable from ISO. If you had cared to download it you would have found that your claims are BS:
The problems are in: charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, and SmartArt.
Charts, watermarks, tracked changes and SmartArt are not open/documented in the OOXML formats.
Charts are part of DrawingML and described in section 21.2 Charts.
Watermarks are described as part of the document settings/template feature. See section 11.1
Tracked changes for DocumentML is described in full in section 17.13.5 Revisions. Similar sections exists for e.g. SpreadsheetML.
The built-in SmartArt gallery is not part of the standard. But any SmartArt "chart" is just a DrawingML part with a datamodel, both of which are described in sections 14 and 21. It is not like the graphics are intermingled with the data in such a way that others have no way of figuring out what's going on. SmartArt is the term used for the manipulation of such graphics. At all times the "data" is kept separate from the graphics and the end-graphics is the result of a transformation. A transformation which is fully described in the standard.
Styles and fonts (assuming you mean text styles in Word) are described in section 17.7 Styles and 17.8 Fonts
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
hahaha. after all the customers and partners they left halfway, thousands of merchants who learned their estore was going to be shut down in bcentral in one morning, zune, halo 2 multiplayer drop, this that ...
i mean, how can they. this is the equivalent of getting caught committing adultery, and firing back by accusing others of adultery.
Read radical news here
When Microsoft badmouths a rival product, then you know it must be really good...
Google should make an ad out of this, really
"Would Microsoft badmouth Google Docs, if it wasn't really great?"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
True. ...").
OpenOffice certainly isn't perfect either.
When OO reached 3 and repeatedly destroyed some documents when editing files created with 2.x several of our departments switched back to MS Office ("Better the devil you know
We're suddenly back in 1994, and "the job's not done until WordPerfect won't run!"
I thought Apple had taken the lead on that now, "the Job's not done until Flash won't run!"
At time of this posting parent is modded zero.
All parent did was to provide the exact information GP was asking for. Is the truth really so inconvenient?
Even if you don't agree, please show some integrity when modding, ok?
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
"It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products..."
And, "... valuing customer lock-in over actual innovation."
Microsoft is EXTREMELY abusive, in my opinion. In this case, most of the customers can't fight the extremely expensive hassles Microsoft creates, and they pay Microsoft again and again as the company changes its file formats.
I think all file formats should be in the public domain. Any company that doesn't open its formats should face anti-trust action.
Purely out of curiosity, how is having your data locked into Google's application and stored in who-knows-what format on the backend any better than being locked into Microsoft?
(Yes I know Google allows you to download your files in a number of common formats and they provide a scripting API. Does it store the data in, say, ODF at the backend? Considering GFS isn't POSIX compliant, is it even stored in a form that conceptually resembles a file? If the document is converted on the fly when you download it, is the conversion process perfect?)
Yes, it is a valid point that data can potentially be locked into Google's universe. However, Google have set up a website, http://www.dataliberation.org/ to help move data in and out of its products. Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly not Microsoft.
Documents are shared, we've got people in different countries editing (and then reviewers re-reading, fixing typos, etc.) the shared documents then we use the Google API to fetch them and incorporate them in our "webapp build process".
Works just so nicely.
Oh, and if there's no Internet anymore, we've got no business anymore so the fact that we rely on Google is really not an issue for us (our pragmatic view is all about efficiency).
We've got people on Windows, OS X and Linux collaborating on this. There's NO WAY we could do the same with Office, not to mention things like easy export etc.
No anti-virus needed, no patch tuesday for those who don't want to.
Google docs is a godsend to SMEs (and SMEs represent, in any single country, at least 50% of a country's PIB).
So besides a few non-tech-savvy corporate juggernaut, Google Docs is a huge threat to Office and I understand MS playing scared-FUD.
As to tech-savvy corporate juggernaut (Google, Apple, IBM, Oracle/Sun, FedEx, Walmart, ...), they already know better than Windows /etc. Basically high on anything non-Microsoft because they can't stand mediocrity).
(they are all high on Un*x / Java
Now I didn't have that problem, but the issue for me is that all advanced formatting is essentially lost when you upload to Google Docs.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Now mods, "-1 Flamebait" is not the moderation for "-1 I disagree" and seeing there is no moderation for that someone please mod parent up.
In other words Pot...Kettle, Kettle this is Pot...
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
Microsoft imagined that it will dominate the world, but the google came and it placed an end in that history. Reinaldo Silva http://www.otimizacaodesites.org/ Brazil
If you have a hierarchical folder tree, how best to turn that information into meaningful tags?
Here's how MediaWiki solves that problem: Each tag (called a Category) has its own page, but this page can itself have Categories. So for each folder, create a Category, and list the Categories corresponding to its parent folders,
I either think that you never did a big deal or sucked at it. You are NOT going to get that contract if the supplier knows that you have no choice.
Proof me wrong: Get MS to accept liability for anything wrong with their product. You can't. If you trucks blew up because of a security flaw, the truck company has to compensate you. Does MS compensate you for its security flaws?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Curious, why didn't you switch back to 2.x? It was obviously good enough before 3.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The use of generic terms after abbreviations, often called "RAS syndrome" is useful for distinguishing Automated Teller Machine from Asynchronous Transfer Mode or Portable Document Format from Probability Density Function.
Almost without exception, WYSIWYG editors suck. I only say 'almost' because I'm willing to admit that in some parallel universe, some Leonardo of the keyboard might conceivably have invented a WYSIWYG word processor that actually does an adequate job at non-trivial tasks.
I seem to remember that LyX, a graphical editor for LaTeX documents, popularized What You See Is What You Mean in word processing. Except I don't see any contributor named Leonard.
I use MS Office for work, NeoOffice on my Mac, and Google Docs in between. I find Docs to be fine for general purpose stuff, but I agree that it is lacking fidelity.
Two cases in point.
First, I needed my wife to review a rules set for a game that I produce and Google Docs seemed to be the way to do it as she was at work and I was at home. I lost all formatting, but that was easily recreated. No big deal, lesson being share docs like this when remote collaboration is required, but plan on having to redo formatting when you finalize the project. My intent to do this again is to set up a wiki with restricted access and see what the formatting will let me do there.
Second, I contract/telecommute. Recently due to a hardware failure, I lost the database that I track time and projects in and needed a quickie replacement, so I duplicated the time entry portion in Google Docs Spreadsheet. It has been adequate, but the time/date calculation portions leave something to be desired. Again, it gets me past my problem, but it's far from ideal.
So I have to agree that Google Docs does not provide total fidelity, but it does a pretty good job within its limitations and when used wisely. And I don't need perfect fidelity for my purposes.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I have to call FUD on that -- Word 2007 will read file formats from before those students were born. If they are claiming that Word ate their homework, they are lying.
Unless Word 2003 at school won't easily recognize .docx files from Word 2007 at home, nor will the school district's IT department let the student install the import filter.
Because they had to have something which will still be compatible with newly updated file formats and the suits didn't want to wait until the OO project got their act together and fixed the backward compatibility.
Calibri is a Microsoft-only font that comes with Vista. So non-Vista systems render the text in Times Roman.
Microsoft Office Word 2007 comes with these new fonts too. So even if you are running XP, you still get Calibri, Consolas, and Cambria.
Would you allow your truck fleet to be provided by only ONE company and have that company know it?
Plenty of city police departments run a fleet of all Crown Vics.
Image files are standardized, and I can expect a .png made in Photoshop to still look the same in GIMP or MS Paint.
But are layered image files standardized? Can I take a .psd from recent Photoshop CS, export it to .xcf (or vice versa), and then continue editing it layer by layer?
Strange. I routinely cut and paste heavily formatted complete documents from Word to SeaMonkey and get an HTML document that's as close to the Word document as HTML allows. This includes table of contents, images and tables. I find it hard to believe that Open office and Google docs are less capable.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
so we should be able to use these formats in competing products right?
wrong.
the formats are built around Microsoft Office, not the other way around.
How much of the supposedly "open" specs relies on algorithms known only to Microsoft?
There is no other product available that can display Microsoft Word documents with correct formatting intact.
Even Microsoft Word cannot correctly import some of the older documents. When 100% compatibility doesn't even exist between all versions of the one product, how can you rely on the file format as a reliable format for storage and backup?
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
I use MS Office for work, NeoOffice on my Mac, and Google Docs in between. I find Docs to be fine for general purpose stuff, but I agree that it is lacking fidelity
Whatever happened to Open Formats, sorry that should read Open Standards. I wonder will Microsofts' Office Live Workspace suffer the same fidelity problems. Or will the 'Office Live` people get full access to the msOffice developers?
I downloaded those files: "Click here to download a zip file with all of the PDF files." from this page: Microsoft Office File Formats Introduction. There are hundreds of megabytes of files.
They apparently list is only what Microsoft calls "protocols". There is a list of the name of what is in every byte, but very little information information, that I was able to find, of how the file format works. There is therefore nothing "open" or documented. What is "open" is mostly just a list of the variable names given each byte in a binary file.