What Does the Microsoft ODF Converter Mean? 177
Andy Updegrove writes "It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project - time enough for 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments. Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out what it all means. In this entry, I report on a long chat with Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs Jason Matusow, and match up his responses with the official messaging in the converter press release. The result is a picture of a continuing, if slow and jerky, evolution within Microsoft as those that recognize market demands for more openness debate those that want to follow the old way. This internal divide means that the proponents of change need to point to real market threats in order to justify incremental changes. This adaptation by reaction process leaves Microsoft still lagging the market, but has allowed those that favor a more open approach to gradually turn the battle ship a few degrees at a time."
Oh, Boy! (Score:2, Interesting)
Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:5, Interesting)
When will "professionals" realize that Word is not meant for all documents? It's great for short documents, posters, etc. But for real professional looking documents it's hard to beat a typesetter like TeX [or LaTeX].
This has nothing to do with bashing MSFT and everything to do with bashing the "one size fits all" mentality.
Tom - Who hates writing a book in Word but will do it anyways because its good for the resume.
Turning the ship heading... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It means... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just create your resume in HTML and rename it to
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I do admire the geek-pride of using TeX for that. I used to Blog in TeX, often because I didn't like MathML and was talking about math.
What I'm talking about moreso are books [even non-math books] and papers. It's so much cleaner to write them in LaTeX with the book class macros then in Word. For one thing, TeX handles all the layout for you, so the even/odd margins [e.g. where the fold goes], starting chapters on the right page, headers/footers. Then not to mention the easy to auto-number [and list] figures and other goodies.
Most of which [except the layout] you can do in Word, just it's a royal pain in the ass. For example, I routinely have to tell Word to "restart counting" because it thinks all number lists are joined some how. In TeX, it's just \begin{enumerate} and you're off to the races.
My first book [BUY IT!!!] was done purely in LaTeX and in my opinion looks classy. My second book [not out yet] is being written with Word and while I pray the final product looks good [and reads well] it's hard to get all jazzed about a non-laid out document which I can only picture what will look like...
Tom
Re:Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
If they wanted an open-source project, they should have published an open-source application. Furthermore, the ODF converter doesn't hook into the save-as dialog. Why? Because plugins in office don't support that.
If they wanted ODF compatability, they should have PATCHED THE FILE DIALOG, not do some Open-Source song-and-dance to turn some RMS fanboys' faces red and Redmond fanboys' pants white.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
People often comment on how nice my documents look, my response is, it's because I don't use Word. Microsoft Word has always been terrible at creating attractive documents. It doesn't follow typesetting rules. I use Apple Pages now, used to use WordPerfect. Both produce documents that look much better than a standard Word document. In fact WordPerfect of ten years ago produced better looking documents than the current version of Word.
The real reason for this project is... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Battleship (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is almost the opposite. Microsoft has always been at its best when it was not in control of the market, and had to fight for success. I remember very, very fondly Word 2.0 on DOS. That was a thing of beauty, and it came out of the need to compete with WordPerfect and Wang and all the other word processors on the market in those days. Microsoft weren't trying to lock out new competitors in those days, they were participants in a competitive landscape. That is what is missing -- that idea that they are participants in a fray, not the idea that they should enforce the Pax Microsoftia where no competitors are allowed.
some sort of OpenOfficeConverter??? (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize that OpenOffice has got an incredibly complex build system, and just sitting down and modifying is more than a simple task. However, it IS open-source, so I was wondering if anyone has considered this possibility:
What about a nice, self-contained version of OpenOffice, but with all of the GUI stuff stripped out, which instead of opening the editor, simply opens a little drag'n'drop dialog box. You select your desired "output format", and drop any document supported by OpenOffice into this window. This would include ODF files, Word docs, RTF, etc. It would then perform the equivalent of "Open" and "Save" in OpenOffice, in whatever format you specified.
Voila, instant converter!
I would think this would be a baby-step towards having a nice universal document converter. It doesn't strike me as totally necessary to have it as an Add-in to Word, at least not immediately.
Yes, this would use OpenOffice's reverse-engineering MSdoc parser for converting to ODF, rather than using Word's native code, but I imagine it would be a good start anyways, and easier to do.
Anyways, I've tried to build OO before and quickly ran out of RAM and disk space, but maybe someone would be up to the task.
Re:Avoid the bash and move straight to the tangent (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to think that "professionals" have no problem grasping that Word isn't really good for anything. Office drones and beginners may get by with writing shopping lists and memos in Word, but I consider it unfortunate that their sheer number perpetuate the notion that Word is the tool to use for generating documents of any type.
But for real professional looking documents it's hard to beat a typesetter like TeX [or LaTeX].
Agreed, but most anyone can crank out a short document, poster, etc. faster in LaTeX than some else pointing and clicking their way using Word. Long articles and books doubly so.
I submitted the following as a story some time ago. It wasn't accepted so I'm guessing most
Love at First Byte -- Among the many enduring passions of Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming is only the one with the most pages. [stanfordalumni.org],
A publishing company that used Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Their stock and trade is Securities and Insurance Course ware. When I started there, they were in the midst of a massive project to migrate from Word perfect to Word for all heir courses.
That's right, they maintained 200 plus page securities courses in Word, running on Windows 95 and 98.
One problem with this was the fact that word always formatted the document for your "Default Printer" which in this case caused things like floating text boxes and graphics to move around the page. Every time someone worked with the files on a new computer they had to start by reformatting the document for their desktop. (Shared printers were a novel concept at the company, which was another part of the problem.)
I tried to get the company to at least try Quark, Pagemaker and the like. It got shot down for two reasons. First, they couldn't pirate them as easily as they could Word 98 and 2000, so it would be too expensive. The second reason blew my mind.
The owner told me: "I never even heard of these things. What do you think Word is for anyway? Do you think they became the biggest company on the planet by selling crap? I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for something inferior to Word."
The company owner had a very clear and definitive, "If it's from Microsoft, it MUST be the best product available" attitude.
Apples - Oranges (Score:1, Interesting)
"OpenXML and ODF were created for two very different purposes, and OpenXML is far superior to ODF."
If two things are created for two very different purposes how could one possibly be better than the other? Allow me to butcher a common colloquialism.
The apple and the orange were created for two very different purposes, and the orange is far superior to the apple.
Re:A publishing company that used Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Then they tried sending a Publisher file to their preferred printing company. (Financial Campus' owner was a part owner of the printing firm)
It turned out their hardware couldn't use Publisher files, and the Publisher generated EPS files were apparently a Microsoft Specific variant on EPS that their systems couldn't parse.
So Publisher was similarly discarded, and the owner continued to insist Word was the "Best tool for the job."
Thank goodness... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can they extend the format? (Score:3, Interesting)
This will give Microsoft a chance to embrace and extend ODF, so maybe in a few years everyone will be using Microsoft's ODF format. If the format isn't capable of doing everything that existing formats already do, then it isn't ready to be a standard yet.
So I'm going to use OpenOffice, you will use KOffice, and my boss will use Microsoft Office, and none of us will be able to read each others files. Welcome to 1989 when people got sick and tired of converting between WordStar, WordPerfect, MS Word, and AbiWord - so slowly everyone moved to the dominant player because interoperability was just too frustrating.
If ODF doesn't have a solution to this problem then it is completely pointless.