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."

Comments

Vendor Lock-in

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Vendor Lock-in

[crafty.munchkin]

Regardless of vendor lock-in, they're missing a crucial element - the employees of the Australian Public Service are terrible and impossible to retrain.

Re:Vendor Lock-in

[crafty.munchkin]

... spoken proudly as an ex-employee of the APS! :)

TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Kupfernigk]

The message of the central article is, basically, the same as the old mantra. Microsoft has the widest office platform with Sharepoint and Exchange, therefore it is the right answer.

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.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[sidthegeek]

This is exactly why I think simple plain text files are superior in many cases. I've seen people create Word documents just to store individual links. While a bookmark system would have been ideal, plain text would have been a much better solution. Like you said, marked-up plaintext is what powers CMSes and wikis. If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[philip.paradis]

If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.

LaTex is awesome. It really and truly is. The trouble is that you're absolutely never going to get typical office workers to even read things like this, let along actually use what you're recommending.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[GreatBunzinni]

I would like to know where do you find any word processor, such as Microsoft Word or even Libre Office Writer, to be superior to LaTeX in any aspect. It obviously isn't on the support for math notation, and it isn't on reference management, on colaborative work, on revision control, or on system requirements. It is also not in productivity, both by "advanced" users and specially in newbies.

The only aspect where I see that word processors may appear to be superior is in table formatting and in managing figures. Yet, that apparent superiority doesn't go beyond the discovery that pictures can be dragged and dropped to a document. Once the user is forced to format those objects then all hell breaks loose.

So, exactly where do you see word processors as being always superior to writing LaTeX documents through a text editor?

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[vAltyR]

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.

Almost all of it. The entire purpose of typesetting systems such as (La)TeX is to make it so the users didn't have to worry about such things.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, normal people can use a word processor ?

Come on, surely you can see the problem.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[GreatBunzinni]

I don't see why normal people wouldn't be able to write a LaTeX document. Setting up a new document may be tricky for a absolute newbie, but that's nothing that can't be taken care by a template with a half dozen lines, and learned in a couple of minutes. From there, basically the only thing a user needs to know is to use commands such as \chapter, \section, \subsection and the like, and know how to write. How is that hard?

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Zarhan]

...and floats, and tables, and formatting of said tables, and different kinds of list styles, and,....

I've written several papers using Lyx, which fortunately manages to hide most of the annoying things of Latex. But it's *not* friendly. And don't even get started on Bibtex..Not that MS Word's XML-based system is any better, but at least I don't have to worry about mystical compliation errors due to an extra comma.

The only problem with MS Word is that unless explicitly configured to enforce usage of styles (and not just directly choosing fonts), you'll end up with bunch of documents that are pain to maintain.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.

LaTex is awesome. It really and truly is. The trouble is that you're absolutely never going to get typical office workers to even read things like this, let along actually use what you're recommending.

Its output is pretty but the language is a complete mess. Packages are designed without much forethought and are sometimes incompatible with each other. It is really difficult to achieve fine control over the formatting unless you are a latex guru. Error messages are incomprehensible. Basic things like the occasional overlong lines are hard to fix. It's definitely not awesome, at best it's a necessary evil if you want high-quality papers.

Lyx makes latex a bit more bearable, but if you want fine control you need to go down to the latex level anyway.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent +: He has got it in one.

I have learned LaTeX at least 3 times in the last 20 years, and forgot it immediately afterwards. Arcane does not even begin to describe it, and there is no way any of that effort is needed if its not going to a learned publication I could probably do the job faster setting lead type on a letter press, if you include the learning overhead and the hacking of the various scripts. .

Government departments need to learn to use plain text if they don't want to have the public demanding their pay cut for profligacy.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[TheRaven64]

I think the thing that you're missing is that most normal people can't do these things in Word either. Let's take the cross referencing example. I recently proofread a masters dissertation for a friend who is not a native speaker. She was using Word, and used Word in her day job. Yet all of the references to figures were done by explicitly typing 'See Figure 12'. When I suggested that she might want to add a figure, she said that she didn't want to because she'd have to renumber everything. I was pretty shocked by this, since that's exactly the sort of thing that computers are supposed to do - the boring and repetitive tasks. Surely, I said, Word can do this? Yes, it can, and actually Word's cross-referencing tool is more powerful than LaTeX's one (which is pretty primitive, although there are a few packages that improve it).

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[TheRaven64]

The problem is not the packages, it is that TeX is a case study in how not to design a programming language. It is evidence that you should only listen to Knuth when he talks about theory, not about implementation. The language has no concept of scope! Creating a programming language that has no support for structured programming is simply inexcusable. The other problem with LaTeX is that there is no separation of content and presentation. The input file is just a turing machine tape.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[subreality]

For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years ...

20 years ago I was using Borland C. Nothing since has ever touched the beautiful integration of editing, compiling and debugging that BC had. The write-compile-test cycle was breathtakingly fast and convenient.

I'm not saying we haven't made progress. The editor I use now creams it, and I'm not looking to go back. But from a pure IDE standpoint, no, things pretty much peaked in the early to mid '90s.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[GreatBunzinni]

The last time I used Microsoft Word 2007 to input equations was a couple of months ago, and although it is able to represent simple equations, like the ones involving index notation, fractions and other basic notation elements, the only way it was possible to enumerate them was if the user relied on a couple of obscure nasty hacks which fail to be even adequate.

And even then, equations in Microsoft Word 2007 are still represented in a crude and unpretty way when compared to the much simpler and straight-forward TeX way of doing things.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[GreatBunzinni]

It really depends on what's your definition of "friendly". For example, I see BibTeX as the friendliest bibliography system there is, mainly due to the fact that when you use it you don't even need to be aware you are using it. You just pick your bibliography file and simply reference what you wish to reference. What's unfriendly about the following command?

\cite{some_book}

Managing a BibTeX bibliography is also quite simple and straight-forward. A user only needs to open a text file with a text editor and add an entry to a book. What's unfriendly about the following entry?

@Book{some_book,
                AUTHOR = {The author's name},
                TITLE = {the title of the book},
                PUBLISHER = {The publisher's name},
                YEAR = {some year},
                isbn = {a ISBN reference},
}

If we compare using BibTeX with the god-awful way Microsoft Word handles bibliographies we lose any reason to claim that word processors are somehow better at its job than LaTeX. So, why do some people keep parrotting that word processors such as Microsoft Word are somehow better at producing documents than LaTeX? This sort of claim simply goes against reality.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[TheRaven64]

Subscripts and superscripts in TeX work fine in math mode. _{this is subscript} and ^{this is superscript}. For chemistry, you probably want to be typesetting all chemical formulae in math mode, e.g.

Poor old Joe, he's dead and gone\\
His face you'll see no more\\
For what he thought was $H_2O$\\
Was $H_2SO_4$.

Hmmm - some confusing logic here.

[ancienthart]

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."

Uh, yeah, right.

[Robert Zenz]

...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.

Re:What about ODF?

[Bert64]

Yes change tracking is most definitely better served by revision control systems... Many organisations have had the change tracking systems in programs like word come to bite them in the ass pretty badly as comments they thought had been removed were still visible...

What's really stopping ODF tho, is MS... They technically support it, but their support is of an older version, is generally poor and they have made bad faith moves by exploiting loopholes in the spec to intentionally create incompatibilities.

Which Microsoft format? XLS?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Which Microsoft format? XLS?

[Gadget_Guy]

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 (?).

Then it had been misnamed by someone, because Microsoft use a variety of different extensions for their new file format (depending on whether it contains macros), and XLS is not one of them.

You can get the compatibility pack for previous versions of office to allow you to open the new file format in your version of Office and a lot of the earlier ones (it is not listed, but the pack works back to at least Office 97). It works pretty well, and means that you are not forced to upgrade with "a series of endless incompatible formats". I only upgrade about once a decade, and even then it is only when I get given an upgrade for free. Also, the file formats only change once a decade too, so it is not too much of a problem (the last change prior to 2007 format was with Office 97).

User training

[Kupfernigk]

Of course not. 99% of office users might have gone on a course of a day or so, and then they learn from other people, getting shown by example. You may remember a year or so ago the US Federal Government looked at an agency that still used more or less a text based front end to a database, running SQL queries to get reports. It was suggested they would be more productive with an Excel front end. The study concluded that it was quite easy to train people to use the SQL-based front end, which did everything necessary, and the cost of conversion simply wasn't worthwhile.

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.

Re:User training

[philip.paradis]

What I was hinting at, but didn't actually just come out and say before, is that the problem is bigger than this. Take your typical sales or marketing department at any given midsize to large company. Walk in and try any angle conceivable to convince the employees in that department that using something like LaTeX is worthwhile. You'll have a serious problem on your hands. So perhaps you try to go up one level and convince their management. That won't work out well, either. Perhaps you go up another level and talk to the VP of sales. You'll either get a deer in the headlights reaction, or he'll instantly switch to cost/benefit analysis questions, coupled with training requirements questions, coupled with competitive analysis from HR with regard to how other firms in the same industry are doing things compared to your recommendation, etc. It won't be pretty.

I want things to work the way you want. Sadly, they just don't, and they just won't. In fifteen years worth of working in a variety of industries, I've learned these lessons the hard way. The best I can do these days is push for adoption of shiny gizmos that at least utilize open standards at their cores. That sucks, but it's life.

Commercial vs. technical appraisal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about ODF?

[nxtw]

but this seems like something better handled by revision control systems anyhow.

Integrated change tracking is a form of revision control system, embedded into some document formats and applications. It serves a different purpose than a traditional revision control system, and is useful in combination with a traditional RCS or a document management system with its own file-level revision tracking and approval systems (such as SharePoint or Alfresco).

Change tracking systems log a sequence of actions that led to the new state, store time and user metadata inline with these changes, and allow out-of-band content (comments) . The current state of a document with change tracking is (approved content + not yet approved changes + comments). In a traditional RCS, the current state of the document is just the approved content, as there's no approve/deny mechanism for individual changed sections and no metadata at the section level. ("section" here is the unit the RCS uses when differencing files - usually lines in a RCS used to manage source code changes, but in document change tracking, this is often just the part that was changed - could be a single character, could be an entire page of content, could be the metadata for a sentence, etc.)

In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems.

Changes should be tracked as they are made by the user. A traditional RCS tracks the differences in an entire file between the last change and the next commit, so it can't... unless every single change results in a separate (local) commit, and saving results in those commits being pushed to a new branch. But doing this requires the application to have support for change tracking, just with the backend being a RCS instead of inline metadata in the file. And then the individual changes can only be obtained and displayed to the user by getting all of the commits in the branch and replaying them, starting with the original state in-memory.
Using RCS in this way still doesn't solve the approve/reject feature of change tracking, it doesn't solve comments, and it makes showing individual changes a lot more difficult than just storing the changes with inline metadata.

Traditional RCS doesn't know how a change was made; the application does. Changing "this is GREAT" to "that is great" could be a single change (overwrite using paste from clipboard) or many changes in the order they were performed (change "this" to "that", change "GREAT" to "great", adding bold formatting to "great"). The application knows, and it can save this data.

Traditional RCS can be used to atomically track the file-level changes to a document, but it doesn't provide anywhere near the level of detail as change tracking. I don't use MS Office, but I believe it supports both embedded (in-file) change tracking and versioning at the document level (using SharePoint or something that can pretend to be close enough, which I think Alfresco might be able to do).

Re:What about ODF?

[nxtw]

Yes change tracking is most definitely better served by revision control systems... Many organisations have had the change tracking systems in programs like word come to bite them in the ass pretty badly as comments they thought had been removed were still visible...

Sometimes people want to easily communicate changes and comments with others. Accidental use of change tracking features is not a valid reason to prescribe the use of external RCS instead.

Normal people CAN'T use a word processor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Normal people CAN'T use a word processor

[tqk]

Jebus you [think] people are real idiots, don't you? I can't imagine being married to you. Everybody in my work group uses office for some seriously tricked out documents and spreadsheets, and we all get by [just] fine. 95% of [the] time is spent on content creation, and we can share and edit group docs with no problem. We're not all fucking retards just because we prefer a GUI to a command line.

Not all of you, no. As for "getting by jut fine", I beg to differ. I dare you to hand off one of your "jut fine" docs to me. No, just because this is a throwaway post on /. doesn't get you a pass. For some of us, correct composition always matters. We care about those who're going to read it because exact comprehension often matters.

I've seen very competent IT people create files that were a simple, single list of lines, in a spreadsheet program (Excel)! They can't even choose the correct tool to use within the GUI suite.

I'd much prefer everyone to use a simple text editor to write up their content, then hand it to a specialist who knows how to use a GUI word processor/DTP program "to make it pretty."

Unfortunately, welcome to the 21st Century.

Submitter here

[wirelessduck]

The fact is that there are functions in the Microsoft formats that do not translate into the ODF formats. To the extent that these exist, and they are used by some subset of users, ODF does not provide full interoperability. We have also seen that other vendors develop support for OOXML over time.

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.

And, without seekng to defend any vendors, I note that OOXML is an open standard recognised by ISO and IEC as ISO/IEC 29500.

Perhaps someone should enlighten him on the "committe stacking" and "bribery" allergations surrounding the OOXML standardisation process with ISO.

Any degree of lock in must be measured against the costs of changing, particularly if the change cannot be complete and two (or more) systems/applications need to be maintained.

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.

Over time, it is possible, and IMHO likely, that other vendors will also be able to support OOXML – transitional or strict. We see this in the upgrading of OSS suites to handle newer formats (.docx over .doc for example).

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:

Right now I guess the two best reasons for OOXML are:
1) ISO 29500 Transitional has the best chance of faithfully representing all the legacy Office 97-2003 documents that are out there.
2) Microsoft Office has the larger install base by a country mile, giving it greater familiarity with users. This currently implies OOXML.

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.

Re:Open

[Computershack]

...apart from the spell checker you're using.