ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation 262
Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:5, Interesting)
good enough (Score:1, Interesting)
OpenOffice has enough features and performance to satisfy my parents for their document needs at home, and that is primarily for work. I bet most people use their Microsoft Office for similar purposes. OpenOffice is good enough and the price is write, thus satisfying most of the Microsoft Office customers today.
Re:So uh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, there are lots of features only found in MS Word that aren't in OpenOffice. These are things like their document wizard, VBA scripting, object insertion, watermarking, cross-referencing, index marking, and our favorite, Clippy the paperclip.
Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.
There are several reasons for all of these features: You've got one application that's trying to make sure that anyone who uses it can find the features they need. Because MS has hundreds of developers working full time on MS office, and they got to do something to justify their jobs. It looks good in ad copy (millions of features!). And, it is an important element of FUD. (If you switch to OpenOffice, there might be some feature not in OpenOffice that you will need.)
Re:So uh... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can see the same thing if you print it to a file, in PDF format. Instead of positioning the cursor at the start of a line and then printing the line, Word does a separate cursor positioning for each character. A typical PDF file printed by MS-Word is at least ten times as big as would be needed to print the document in exactly the same format using the features of the PDF standard.
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, the way it goes seems to be they start out with MS Word, as it is most familiar. After having lost a couple of papers to its mysteries, they switch to OO Writer. Now, OpenOffice seems to lose just as much data (I'd say it's probably Windows which is at fault here, not the applications), but has a much nicer equation editor, so they stick with that. The amount of cursing is pretty much constant.
What makes you say OO Writer is far worse than MS Word? Last I checked (Office 2k, I think), equation support in MS Office was a joke. I have no idea what version they're running at school, but I suppose it is fairly current.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:3, Interesting)
You say,
Here's the problem. Someone gives me a document with ink and associated content. I decide to use a "not ink-enabled" app to alter the document, and then pass the altered document to someone that views it with "an ink-enabled application". The document that I passed on is now "corrupt" in that the ink that was "preserved" is no longer consistent with the rest of the document's data, because the "not ink-enabled" app that I used to alter the document didn't have the ability to alter the ink accordingly.
Why the OOo Obsession? (Score:0, Interesting)
Seriously WHY does everyone think Open Office is so...... great. KOffice is way nicer. And has more applications.
I have to say I have used Open Office enough to know it's good enough, but I run into formating problems do to a very buggy user interface. seems like I'm constantly fighting with open office in the same way I have to fight with M$ Office in fact I have to fight with it more just to do what should be simple tasks.
Did I mention it takes too long to load and is slow to be responsive. I think it's assinine that if I want it to start in a respectable amount of time that I have to "preload it". I don't use KDE and koffice still loads faster than open office by 10 fold.
And koffice has one feature I've wanted in an office suite for a while now. TABS. I requested in in OOo 3.0 and they told me it wouldn't be implemented because they put it in a beta or some such version and people didn't use it so it won't make it in.
Why am I replying? (Score:3, Interesting)
The simplest reason to want to preserve your own markup is to integrate with other systems. Here's a simplistic example: A content management system may want to store the identity of a document in the document in such a way as that it can be reognised as the same document when re-imported into the CMS after someone's been working on it on some disconnected laptop. Existing metadata may not offer that facility.
Another good case is a plug-in that adds significant functionality to the application and needs to store its data in the document, have it travel with the document, and have its data associated with specific parts of the document. Consider a bibliography editor - if you delete the text with the reference, the editor needs to be able to tell that's happened and not output the associated reference in the full bibilography. Currently such tools maintain their own databases and/or use opaque blobs in the document for this, but these approaches aren't very good - in particular they mean that if the document is edited by a tool that doesn't have the bibliography editor, the information can be lost or damaged.
That's a simplistic example, but in the broader sense it comes down to wanting to be able to do things with a format beyond those that the original designers explicitly considered. Imagine if we still had to use X11 as it was written originally? What a mess. Thankfully, X11 is extensible and well designed so that additions the original designers didn't imagine can be added over time.
A generic, universal "office" document format needs to satisfy that requirement too.
Re:So uh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most likly cause: multiple development groups. One develops the file format, one develops what is saved, one develops what is used from session to session.
I dumped Word 8 years ago (Score:1, Interesting)
When I have to send someone a document I give them PDF.
My company uses OpenOffice and I advise my clients to do the same, but just telling them that their illegal copy of office can get them in to problems. I even hint that someone might just tell the police, and either they buy an Office License which costs a ridicolus amount or they install OpenOffice for free. I help them install, migrate and support the OpenOffice in their business, and I make real money out of it. You can do it too! This market is huge! Sure there are always those that prefer to continue being pirates, but you can always do that anoymous call and force them to license everything.
Re:Decent performance; extended XML (Score:3, Interesting)
My (admittedly very limited) understanding is that this protects the standard from embrace-and-extend tactics. This prevents one from claiming compatibility with the standard while making key functionality dependent on obscured, proprietary data tucked away in non-standard markup. Granted - such intentional limitation can be a double-edged sword.
Re:KOffice also supports the ODF format (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to rewrite that dialog so that it says something like
"you are about to save in a text-only format. are you sure? if you do this, you will be able to access this information for the rest of your life, even if you don't continue to buy our software. Think about it very carefully, then press continue...