Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at Last)

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."

Comments

Sure... Now that it's no longer relevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile ODF already has a huge seven year foothold, and all of this time the format and its applications have been in production use, and have become more and more robust.

Vendor lock-in now ISO-approved

[denis-The-menace]

Yay, another format change.

Bought for you by Microsoft.

**History lesson: How MS got Office Open XML approved**
MS paid the ISO membership fees for a bunch of new ISO members for that one critical ISO vote.
The new members were so happy, they voted to approve Open XML.

This way, the secretive and patent laden file format could be used in government bids where ISO file formats where required.

Soon after this outrageous manoeuvre,
ISO lost it's reputation and became known as I Sold Out.

Re:Vendor lock-in now ISO-approved

[HappyHead]

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).

Sure it will

[killmenow]

It'll be fully compatible. It'll just be one big block like this:

<![CDATA[...]]>

Re:the thought of involving

[ichthus]

Yeah, this is why both Google Docs and Open/LiberOffice utilize and support ODF. Sure, it's just hand-waving.

Please.

Strangely Google Docs does not accept ODF

[Shompol]

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.

Re:It will save them*

[Anpheus]

I just tried opening up the most complicated template in Word 2013 that I could find (the annual report template looked pretty busy) and I threw some charts in with data and tried saving as Strict Open XML.

It saved without any prompt.

Re:What the Fuck.

[Tough Love]

MS got an ISO standard by buying it about 2 years after ODF was the approved.

Destroying ISO as a credible organization in the process.

Re:Doubtful.

[Pope Raymond Lama]

To whoever missed the "format wars" they are nicely (And fervently) documented on Jomar Silva's (A.K.A. Homembit) blog -
ending at 2008-09 entries: http://homembit.com/2008/09/popular-participation-on-international-standardization-process-opening-the-black-box.html

Jomar, a core contributor to ODF, was one of Brazil's envoy to the ISO group in which Microsoft format were aproved, trying to prevent it from happening as it went.

Re:Doubtful.

[hAckz0r]

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