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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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."

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.

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.

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.