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Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at Last)

Posted by Soulskill on from the super-fast-turnaround dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "Between 2005 and 2008, an unparalleled standards war was waged between Microsoft, on the one hand, and IBM, Google, Oracle and additional companies on the other. At the heart of the battle were two document formats, one called ODF, developed by OASIS, a standards development consortium, and Open XML, a specification developed by Microsoft. Both were submitted to, and adopted by, global standards groups ISO/IEC. But then Microsoft never fully adopted its own standard. Instead, it implemented what it called 'Transitional Open XML,' which was better adapted for use in connection with documents created using older versions of Office. Yesterday, Microsoft announced in a blog entry that it will finally make it possible for Office users to open, edit and save documents in the format that ISO/IEC approved."

8 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Doubtful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Several of the complaints registered by members of the ISO approval committee (which were ignored by the paid-off chair), involved sections of the specification that caused it to be physically impossible to actually implement.

    1. Re:Doubtful. by Xtifr · · Score: 4, Informative

      I suspect he's referring to the many tags whose only functional definition is by reference to undefined behavior of earlier MS products. Which is not so much impossible to implement (obviously MS can do so) as it is impossible for anyone but MS to verify. Which makes it a little hard to call it a standard.

    2. Re:Doubtful. by gerddie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Several of the complaints registered by members of the ISO approval committee (which were ignored by the paid-off chair), involved sections of the specification that caused it to be physically impossible to actually implement.

      How bizarre! So what exactly is it that makes it impossible to implement?

      He probably meant impossble for anyone not being Microsoft. There is, for example a tag called autoSpaceLikeWord95 standing for Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing; and there is more.

    3. Re:Doubtful. by hAckz0r · · Score: 5, Informative

      How bizarre! So what exactly is it that makes it impossible to implement?

      Well, for one, the OOXML specification allows binary blobs to be imbeded in the XML document, and many of the Microsoft specific blobs they embed are NOT documented anywhere. In fact, when Microsoft paid Novel to implement the OOXML specification for OpenOffice (so that MS could say theirs is not the only implimentation) the Contract dictated that Novell was NOT allowed to touch/render/interpret any binary blobs that Microsoft was currently using in their own implimentation. If you can't interpret or render everything then you can not possibly implement "the standard" in any working product. Complying 100%, with "the standard", without cheating, gives you an unworkable product right out of the gate.

      http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051216153153504

  2. Strangely Google Docs does not accept ODF by Shompol · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google Documents (Drive) happily accepts .doc and .ppt and converts them to a Google Doc format, but not ODF. So to create a presentation in Libre Office I need to "Save as Office 2003 ppt", followed by import into Google Docs, for the obvious reason that no computer in a typical conference room can open an ODF presenation.

    1. Re:Strangely Google Docs does not accept ODF by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ironically, Office Web Apps (the thing that lets you open/edit Word and Excel documents on SkyDrive), does support ODF, though I'm not sure about the version.

      Also, I don't get the story. MS Office was able to open, edit and save ODF 1.1 docs since 2007 SP 1. Yeah, it was an interop mess vis a vis OO.org for spreadsheets because the formulas weren't covered by the spec, and they implemented that differently. But it was still technically an ISO/IEC format.

      The real news here is that Office 2013 supports ODF 1.2 (there is a table in the blog post linked from TFA). Which means that spreadsheets should now be fully portable between MSOffice and other ODF implementations. With that there, who cares about ISO OpenXML?

  3. Re:Vendor lock-in now ISO-approved by HappyHead · · Score: 5, Informative

    Soon after this outrageous manoeuvre,

    ISO lost it's reputation and became known as I Sold Out.

    Not only that, but soon after this outrageous manoeuvre, the vast majority of these new ISO members Microsoft had bought never showed up for another meeting - meetings requiring of course, a minimum percentage in attendance to actually approve anything, which then, due to the bulk of members having no interest in the committee except for casting their pro-MS vote in order to receive their bribes, did not have enough members present to actually do anything.

    And this is the story of how Microsoft broke the ISO, so they could fake their way into government contracts by falsely claiming that their office software supported an ISO standard (which even Microsoft didn't actually support).

  4. Re:It will save them* by casper75 · · Score: 3, Informative

    You can set it as the default in the options dialog if you want. And I'm sure companies that use group policies could set it as the default company wide if they want.