Aussie Government Proposes OpenDocument As the Standard Format

Bismillah writes "The Australian government chief technical officer wants some views on proposals for the official standard operating environment, which features OpenDocument as the proposed document format. Otherwise, the Aussie government is pretty much a Microsoft shop, with Windows 7 x64 and IE10 as the standard platform. 'Interoperability and support for several versions of Microsoft Office is cited by the AGCTO as reasons to go with ODF, along with flexibility and the fact that the format is continously updated and developed. Spreadsheet formulae are now included in the ODF 1.2 specification as well and the AGTO believes that this, along with Microsoft Office 2013 supporting the format, will help to reliably transfer formulae between applications.' According to the CTO's call for opinions, 'Standardizing on a format supported by a wide range of office suites provides for the greatest possible degree of interoperability without mandating the use of a specific product, as well as providing the best basis for reliable interchange of information between agencies deploying differing office productivity suites.'"

Comments

Seen it first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in government for a few years. They heavily rely on documents. The amount of time spent on re-formatting broken documents (particularly between versions of Office) is -staggering-. Microsoft office incompatibility is a major issue and costs the Australian tax payer an absolute fortune.

I do not promise that using ODF will fix the problems, but I constantly heard people (not a person, but people) fighting Microsoft Office, broken templates, formatting, etc. Constantly means "pretty much 8 hours a day, 5 days a week". I cringed every time I would open up a document, because in all likelihood, the formatting was kludged together.

I have been using Office suites for about 20 years, and I can tell you that "paste as text" is not enough to avoid the dreadded Microsoft Word "spiral of death". I use styles, I don't mess with indents and outdents, nor do I change the formatting of individual paragraphs - but I have been caught out more times than I can count - even when following these rules. The most hardcore users I've come across all say that it comes down to experience, and knowing what to avoid ...

I think the Aus government are making a good call - hopefully they've considered their migration plans - and chosen their tools well.

For the record, iTunes and Microsoft Office are two of my most hated applications, with good reason.

Re:Seen it first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Office is a damn fucking nightmare when it comes to things like consistency and accuracy. Using cut and paste directly between documents isn't just a crapshoot, it's an inevitable disaster.

You'd think the clipboard would be a nice, program agnostic buffer for transposing information between programs. Not with office. Office actually has it's own internal clipboard that runs in parallel with the system one so the rules don't apply. (Thats a very common theme with office. It breaks all sorts of UI conventions, uses numerous undocumented system hooks, etc) When you copy-paste in office you don't know what kind of bizarre binary constructs can be dumped in to your document. What you can know is that they'll cause inconsistent behavior and broken documents that cannot be fixed inside office.. Because copying the data out silently brings the corruption with it.

The only way to achieve any kind of consistency is to work in an outside program, and put off bringing the data in to office at the very last possible moment. It's pretty sad when you have to treat word docs like they're PDFs.

Baring that, using some autohotkey scripts to wash data through a more sane text editor (I like notepad++), works reasonably well. It's an ugly hack, but so is MS Office.