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UK Forces Microsoft To Adopt Open Document Standards
First time accepted submitter Barsteward writes Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government. In 2014, Microsoft went against the government's request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.
Who are you and what have you done with the UK government?
They were (a) right, (b) stuck to their guns and (c) have a technical solution which didn't simply involve shovelling heaps of money at microsoft in exchange for a brutal lock in. Very out of character, not that I'm complaining!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
10% effort into actually implementing this, and
90% effort into examination how to creatively misunderstand OPF, extend ODF with "open" binary extensions, denigrate users of ODF, or just plain break ODF
Or maybe it's 1% vs 99%, I don't know.
Seriously, the only reason I'm obliged to use MS Office is when a company sends a Word (xl...) doc that uses some features that Libre/Open Office don't support (well, or at all). That's basically any of the "comfort" feature. I'm lucky there is a version of MS Office for the Mac, but unfortunately it is badly supported and there are compatibility issues (the MS folks did a fork of MSOffice to develop the Mac version independently of the Windows version. That's severely retarded, but we've got no choice).
If only ODF could be adopted everywhere...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And that makes them hostile to open software in my book. They insist on treating Linux-formatted disks as essentially blank and have Windows tell the user the volume must be formatted to be used; fixing this would be simple in the extreme and would not even require an ability to read an Ext* volume. They stonewall AV formats like Vorbis when they could be added easily to existing apps. Really, the list goes on. The place where they have capitulated is formats that are intrinsic to the web (while parading their proprietary stuff as "open" hoping enough people will take the bait).
MS still promotes lock-in. And from what I gather even their new .NET licensing terms are designed to leave you on the hook.
Ditch the Mac, use Windows and buy Office like all the normal people.
Why are you troubling the people at Microsoft with the self-imposed problems you have created for yourself just because you are trying to be "different"?
You decided to be "different" and but you keep depending on others to fix your problems now that things have gone south. At what point are you going to be a positive member contributing back to society instead of siphoning resources away from the productive members of society?
Microsoft remembers how they took over Lotus' market share for spreadsheets. Lotus had no obscurity with their file format. Excel could read and write it perfectly. Open formats means the product must be as good or better for the price or users can jump ship. Closed formats are a buffer for mistakes or resting on laurels.
I always wondered why Microsoft weren't terminally ashamed that they were the only company in the world that could
1. produce a very good web based email/calendar client
and
2. yet have it not work properly on any browser other than MSIE
surely that fact hurt them when bidding for contracts?
But I don't doubt that their ODF implementation will be equally poor.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Okay, God forbid, I'm actually going to try and treat this fairly. Firstly, recent incarnations of MS Word work using semantic styling, but don't force you to use it. This is much the same as in OO/LO. In general MS tools load files a LOT faster, and are more visually appealing (granted, eye of the beholder and all that), however they don't handle large files. Try opening a 400Mb .csv file in Excel vs in Gnumeric. As far as user friendly interfaces are concerned, I'd say they are both about equally klunky. The ribbon is a menu, really, just looks a little different. Some people prefer it, some people don't.
Now, the "basic tasks" concept. Basic tasks for word processing to me include: writing a letter, writing business document (contract, memo, invoice, quote, waybill, meeting minutes), creating/using templates for those standard documents, designing home flyers (lost dogs, bake sales etc) . These generally require the following 'features' from the software: text manipulation, text formatting, image insertion and basic manipulation (resizing, placement, possibly cropping), tables, tab stops, template editing, headers, footers, page numbering, and text->image conversions (e.g. for banner headings). Both OO/LO and MS Word do all these about equally well imho.
Advanced features: Mail Merge, Mathematical equation editing, Track changes/revision control, cross referencing (index, citations, bibliography, table of contents, list of images etc)
As far as the spreadsheets go, excel and gnumeric are very similar in features as far as I've used them. Never used OO/LO Calc, so I can't say. I suppose charts might be a distinguishing factor, but again, I rarely use charts generated from spreadsheets.
Presentation software (Powerpoint, Impress) seems to be where things really start to differentiate. More transitions, and more bling, in general, is available to PowerPoint users, and compatibility is HORRIBLE even between between powerpoint versions, let alone PP and OO/LO.
In summary: as far basic word processing goes, I don't see a marked difference apart from aesthetics. For Maths, they're both pretty horrible. Track changes they're both about the same (revision control in word processing sucks generally), and I'm not sure about mail merge
I think its more a case of FOSS office is great at being everything but being Microsoft Office, it does not have the "looks like MS Office, works exactly like MS Office" comfort.
I did the slides for a lecture with LibreOffice, after finding PowerPoint mostly unusable. The difference is that LibreOffice Presenter does not stand in your way, but actually helps you expressing what you think. With PowerPoint you always have to do it "their way". As an added benefit, I could work on the slides both on Linux and on Windows, with no compatibility issues whatsoever.
If you do not find people, then it is because you have not looked.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
One thing that MS does for some buyers (this is certainly true for universities, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't true for other large organisations)is give them deeply discounted subscription licenses where the pricing model for those deeply discounted licenses is not based on the number of installations but on some measure of the size of the organisation as a whole.
From the point of view of the customer this initially looks like a great deal. As well as saving money on the licenses themselves they are freed from the need to track installations saving lots of money in license management and auditing. It's subscription based so they pay at a constant rate rather than bursts whenever a new version comes out making budgets easy to manage.
However once the customer is in such an arrangement they lose most of the incentive to reduce the use of the software or use cheaper/free alternatives. They would have to massively reduce their use of the software in question before buying and auditing individual licenses would be cheaper than the subscription. During the transition period of said massive reduciont they would be paying for internal auditing and accounting that would not deliver any benefit or serve any external purpose until the process was complete.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
My experience and opinion: Microsoft is the most EVIL software company.
Wow, that's a pretty bold statement to make here on slashdot. If you're really brave, you could say you quite like Star Wars.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What you call "rituals", many people call "productivity". Learning new software for the sake of learning new software is pointless and a waste of time.
I don't respond to AC's.
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
Yeah, now you have to request a start button.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I'm aware of the difference between Calc and gnumeric, but I was trying to answer the question of "what is considered a basic task?" which isn't exactly dependent on a specific piece of software. I have more experience with gnumeric, as I pointed out. And yes, once you hit large spreadsheets, you should use a database, but often I have to deal with large datasets that are stored in databases and *exported* as .csv files for analysis, or with .csv files dumped directly from sensors or other devices. Whilst I'm writing the programs that either produce or consume these, it's often easier to view them in a spreadsheet, rather than a text file layout, because the visual distinction of column is preserved. I admit, that this is probably not a common use case though, and hence not a "basic task", but databases aren't great at data analysis, which is why this stuff often gets loaded into a spreadsheet, this is where statistics applications come in. Good luck getting Bossman McMBA to use something like that. So I'd say this is probably somewhere between "basic" and "advanced". I would like to throw one more thing into the hat though, and that is the MS Word is appalling at handling large documents (40 pages plus, depending on the machine). LO/OO writer is much better in this regard, and I do regard this as a "basic task"; There are many business documents (quarterly reports, impact assessments, white papers, blah) and even personal documents (academic dissertations, and student projects, home authorship of books) that can get this large.