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Australian Govt Re-Kindles Office File Format War
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's peak IT strategy group has issued a cautious updated appraisal of currently available office productivity suite file formats, in what appears to be an attempt to more fully explain its thinking about the merits of open standards such as OpenDocument versus more proprietary file formats promulgated by vendors like Microsoft."
How about the merit of even being able to re-evaluate their choice of file format because they aren't being locked in by their vendor?
is always better than propriatary!
What isn't being questioned is whether the question being asked is the right one. Despite the huge investment in "office" technologies, have they really increased productivity or effectiveness?
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years, software development has gone from something where you trod a minefield of minor issues and only the highly skilled could safely write business logic, to something where an invisible, benevolent being holds your hand at every step, autocompleting, identifying deprecations, and allowing you simply to concentrate on getting the job done. As a result, programmers are more productive. It is interesting watching new graduates and realising that they have simply never experienced a world in which you type, compile, fix, type, compile, fix....with most of fix being minor problems that the compiler complains about, and then start actually to debug. In those same 20 years, has office technology got more efficient to the same degree in terms of actual work done? No. Exactly like the medieval monks, the basic task of transcribing the Bible has barely improved (spelling and grammar checkers? Look at the frequent homophones nowadays - car breaks, loose for lose, and the rest of them) and all the effort has gone into illuminating the title page and margins. Office 2010 is basically an illuminated manuscript generator, absorbing vast amounts of effort in decorating a piece of paper or a screen to conceal the fact that the actual content is mundane and boring.
The really interesting and exciting stuff is happening in CMS-based websites where people post simple marked up text that stands or fails on the quality of its content, not whether it complies with the corporate standard for margin width and precise positioning of the logo.
The new paradigm that is increasingly expected by younger people is a refocussing on the text. Viewed on small screens, decoration isn't much use. More important is immediacy and filing, and email, IM, BBM, even Facebook and twitter, are much better at these. The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.
The question isn't whether Microsoft blobXML or ODF is better; it is how many employed people actually really need to be using them at all.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What's really stopping adoption of things like Open Document Format? I understand the limitations regarding change tracking, but this seems like something better handled by revision control systems anyhow. In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems. Maybe I'm approaching it from a perspective that's too "UNIXy" for some purposes; can someone help me out here?
Write failed: Broken pipe
I find it interesting that the author of the article states that he'd "... love to see some competition for Microsoft Office arise and challenge Redmond's dominance." yet recommends that the Australian Government "... would be silly to choose any other standard than one supported strongly by Microsoft." How does he expect the competition to occur if every government user (which is a MASSIVE userbase in Australia) doesn't have the option of using alternatives?
I'm finding the argument about:
"... licensing costs - which are not a factor with open source suites such as OpenOffice.org - are only 'a small proportion of overall ICT expenditure'. Any software change is likely to involve significant cost in installation, training and maintenance"
a little confusing considering the statement that several departments were:
"... signalled their intention to eventually migrate to Office 2010 as part of their next upgrade."
As a teacher in an Australian school currently being switched to 2010, I'd say that using Microsoft Office 2010 would involve a HIGHER retraining cost than LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
And I still can't understand why the government didn't decide "Microsoft Office 2010 is the preferred Office Suite AT PRESENT, but files must be saved in OpenDocument Formats."
...the Federal Government should stop worrying about this issue, and focus on other areas where platform choice can make a real difference. Allowing users to install their own web browser...
So the author of TFA suggest to stop worrying about such things as interoperability and longevity of Federal Documents and just go with MS Office, and instead worry about the real issues...like Webbrowsers...
'nuff said.
Is the only reason. As soon as you get a OSS that can 100% reliably open an excel sheet then you will win. Such a vast amount of time and money is invested in these spreadsheets - because Excel really has no peer in the marked. You wouldn't believe how much it costs to redevelop and test the working sheets of even a modest company.
I recently received an XLS sheet, it wouldn't open (I have Excel circa 2003). It's silly to call Microsoft's formatS one format just because of the extension.
After playing with the XLS, I discovered that it actually was their XML format in a zip archive. They seem to now be calling that XLS instead of XLSD (?). I found I could open it only in OpenOffice (I wasn't going to do a major expensive upgrade of MS Office just to open this one weird file), I renamed it XLSD and simply opened it.
And that was the end of my Excel use. Enough, I've just had enough of being forced to endlessly upgrade with a series of incompatible formats. He can say that the Australian govt should standardize on *a* Microsoft format, but if *Microsoft* can't standardize on one format, I'm certainly not paying to chase them everytime they change it.
Meanwhile outside of the MS Office environment people are still reading in data files unchanged from the 1980s because they were written to published and easily available standards. That's not in any sort of "commie" environment but something as capitalistic as the oil industry.
People already had answers for compatibility issues before Microsoft even existed. The main perpertators in the software world are Microsoft so it's surreal that their material is chosen "in the interests of compatibility".
This is all about office workers perceiving that being given a program with lots of visual bling implies a higher status than a text based program, e.g. pptx > ppt > xlsx > xls.
Tell them that LaTex is a secret tool of the Illuminati and only the Chosen are allowed to use it, and they would come.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The problem with this sort of appraisal is, that it originates from people with little to zero competence in software design and programming. The evaluation of the competing standards, ODF vs. OpenXML, fails to take future development of IT systems into account.
The problem with Microsoft OpenXML is, that it depends heavily on Windows and on the way today's computer architectures work. Those architectures, especially Windows, are outdated from a software design point of view (even more consistent/elegant designs such as Unix or OS400 are partly outdated in their design or implementation).
The reason why we really need open standards is, that we MUST ensure, that the development of new technologies is not handicapped by dependencies of standards on outdated designs. Today's systems, especially the Windows platform, are prone to security leaks as well as all sorts of malfunctions.
With state-of-the-art design and implementation, it is possible to build computer systems that are orders of magnitude more secure and reliable - but those newer technologies will never find their way to customers, if broken standards like OpenXML make it impossible to port any application software to such new computer architectures.
So, in the end, the question is whether you plan to use Windows+Office+Symantec antivirus the next 200 years, running daily updates, breaking 500 of your 3000 desktop computers twice a year, and employing a 50-people software-repair shop to keep that PC stuff running; or whether you'd rather like to keep the door open for something new, that avoids 99% of the problems that today's mainstream systems have.
They can do some of it, but when the WP decides that the figure goes on the next page, they won't be able to find out how to tell it not to. When they want a paragraph starting on the next page, not split over two, they'll use returns to add blank lines. When the font used gets changed, they'll be adding another font tag inside a now unused font tag. When they need a contents or index, they'll either type it all out by hand or try the wizard and get an answer they don't like (and therefore go and make one by hand again) because how to get it to do what they WANTED, not what they were given, is not possible for them.
In fact, in all the ways they know how to use Word, they know how to use Tex. And in all the ways they don't know how to use Tex, they don't know how to use Word.
That's a great idea! Let's buy Microsoft!
/. has just over 2.5 million members and 131.26 billion divided by 2.5 million is $52, 648 per member.
Okay, so Microsoft's market cap is 263.22 billion dollars at the moment, meaning that having a majority share holding (and thus being able to control the company) would require the purchase of roughly 131.62 billion dollars of stock. Now,
$52, 648 is a bit steep, isn't it? Well that's alright because we can just get a little more creative:
- Of course, asking shills to simply hand the voting rights on their current stock holdings over to the
We can do it /.
Yes We Can
The Sales and Marketing Department is where Office belongs. The content providers need InDesign or whatever. No argument at all. But most office workers do not work in Sales or Marketing ( which is one reason why business continues to function). Often what they actually need is Excel plus a simple, straightforward email client, and even this is really overkill.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Excel is fine where it's needed. So is Word. Someone has actually probably found a use for Powerpoint other that as an insomnia cure in meetings. But most Government workers are not technical specialists, and that was rather my point. That, and the tendency of people to do too much decoration.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You give yourself away by referring to "Times New Roman blandness". TNR is designed to be legible - i.e. easy to read. Conventional formatting is better for understanding large amounts of text. That's why books that people read look the way they do. Jazzy layouts often look pretty but they are actually very hard to understand properly - often the association between text and images or charts isn't clear, the actual content is dubious, the typefaces are wrong for the use case. Word and PPT makes it easy to make stuff that looks creative, but it still requires a great deal of knowledge to make stuff that is good. Electronic composition is not a substitute for understanding composition.
I can actually claim to know something about this. I know a couple of really skilled compositors/designers, and unless your kids have relevant degrees and significant postgraduate experience working alongside older and more experienced people, they simply are not going to be working at anything like that level. If you think that your kids can do "nice as books", I really sincerely doubt that you understand the skills that go into book design, or the difference between good and superficially good.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The simple fact, looking at my current project hierarchy, dependencies, third party libraries, product forks and the rest is that Borland could not have handled it and presented it all as a neat, easy to understand structure through which I can navigate easily. To be more provocative, a good developer today can handle a project, or set of projects, that would have required a team in 1982. That's possible largely because of the tools.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I don't buy the reasons from John Sheridan for leaning towards OOXML. His main argument for going with OOXML over ODF appears to be that "ODF doesn't have 100% compatibility with legacy file formats". If they're going with Microsoft Office, can someone explain which features are not supported in ODF but are supported with OOXML? I find it hard to believe that a large percentage of people will use these "features" that don't exist in ODF.
Perhaps someone should enlighten him on the "committe stacking" and "bribery" allergations surrounding the OOXML standardisation process with ISO.
Why would you need to maintain two systems? If you choose ODF, you can still use Microsoft Office. The only lock-in here would come from choosing OOXML.
Let me know when there's 100% compatibility on OOXML between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. Also, transitional OOXML is the one that ISO rejected/deprecated for containing the "features" from legacy Microsoft file formats. I could also make the same claim here about Office 12 supposedly getting support for ODF1.2 (better late than never eh?), which would make ODF more widely supported than OOXML if it isn't already.
And from another commenter on TFA:
Not sure how the install base of Microsoft Office relates to requiring OOXML, since Microsoft Office supports ODF and OOXML.
If you want to make your voice heard on this issue, AIGMO are accepting comments on their blog posts here and here. Please note that this policy is for internal documents only. As John said in his comment on TFA, documents provided online for the general public to access are normally posted in both PDF and RTF formats and often HTML as well.
"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." - Bernard Baruch
That would have made all those documents that have shown past misdeeds by government and corporations unreadable.
Given all the fire and fury about the leaked emails and demands to hand over everything done by all climate scientists, I find it amusing that the same people are the ones pushing all this auto-deletion and fully-drm'd documentation push by Microsoft. I find it disasterous that the moronic bleating crowd have ignored the double standard and are joining in, unaware of it.
The main reason they let things like this "leak out" into the public, is to put pressure on places like Microsoft to give the gov't a discount. It's happened before ...several times... and it'll happen again. Altho occasionally a gov't/company will actually end up going with open standards, it's rare.
http://www.fitsa-group.com
> Accidental use of change tracking features is not a valid reason to prescribe the use of external RCS instead.
No, it's not; the external RCS being *strictly better* at management of changes is the valid reason. Not exposing yourself to risks is a bonus.
Until you can branch and merge, you're not really managing changes.
Life would be bearable without those dreadful Bold, Italics, List and Font buttons. On any Office product, only styles should be used. Now that would be almost like LaTeX, and that applies to LaTeX too. Once you learn that, you can concentrate on your work - writing the damn document.
However people still try to do layout themselves (concurrently). That always fails miserably, and it will continue to fail eternally. Why do they do that? Bad teachers, bad habits, bad selling points, bad documents, bad courses?
I love Australia. It's a great country. Sydney, Melbourne, the Blue Mountains, the Outback, Perth, Brisbane. The people are terrific.
In terms of population and influence, though, it is not able to rekindle any kind of debate on technology standards on its own. Not even close. The United States? Yes. The EU as a body? Yes. China? Perhaps. Australia? No.
The Australian Relativity Theorem is the inverse of the Chinese Relativity Theorem, which states, "Whatever the rest of the world thinks is a good idea, 1 Billion Chinese couldn't give a damn." In Australia, it's "Whatever 22 million Australians think is a good idea, the rest of the world couldn't give a damn."
It's not a value judgement, guys, because Australia as a country exceeds most others. But as a place with enough gravity to influence standards? No, no it isn't.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If the old system they are using is from microsoft, its incompatible. Or, I should say, its incompatible with every other word processor out there, and *also* incompatible with every future microsoft product, and every past microsoft product. It can read all documents made by previous microsoft products, but no previous microsoft product is compatible with it. They break compatibility intentionally so that people are forced to buy new stuff (and fill microsofts bank accounts to overflowing). Know that whenever they come out with a new product, they will fleece you of millions, whether you want to upgrade or not. Everyone knows what they do. Anyone who posts otherwise (and lord love a duck you find them here on /.), and they are sock/meat puppets. Paid astroturfers and shills who have already sold their children into slavery.
They are Australian as well :P
Sorry, that should have said "Office 15".
"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." - Bernard Baruch
How come the Visio file format that Microsoft bought and included in MS Office is still proprietary and so closed it hasn't been reverse engineered for use by other diagramming software?
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make install -not war