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Portals & Integration blog » ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability
ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability

Since the release of Office 2007 SP2, Office has native support for Open Document Format (ODF). This means that we can get rid of all the plug-ins we've been using so far...

However, first tests with SP2's ODF Save-As functionality shows that it's far from perfect: ODF-documents created from MS-Office look (very) different in OpenOffice and vice versa or can't be opened at all, sometimes even causing hangups. Reason for this seems to be that Microsoft has primarily focussed on conformance to the ODF 1.1-standard it paying less attention to interoperability with format of ODF-files as created by currently most-used ODF-editors. You can read more of those tests here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090503215045379.

For MS-Office users it seems smart to keep those plug-ins at hand, since they show that just conformance is not always the way to go if you need interoperability.

Links:
- Office 2007 SP2
- SUN ODF Plugin
- Clever Age

Posted 06-05-2009 17:04 by Robert te Kaat
Filed under: , ,

Comments

Wouter van Vugt wrote re: ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability
on 07-05-2009 8:28

Gray Knowleton has some interesting things to say about that.

blogs.technet.com/.../rethinking-odf-leadership.aspx

Doug Mahugh too. Seems that without a private beta of Symphony you don't get much improved results.

blogs.msdn.com/.../default.aspx

Few lovely things in Rob's words:

Everyone knows what TODAY() means

uhhuh, sure we do, just like we know what 1 + "two" means.

other vendors are using that (OO) namespace specifically for compatibility with OO's ODF documents

Is that compat by reading the source code instead of the spec?

Not every ODF application checks the namespace of formulas when loading documents

Yeah, let's just load whatever and hope people will conform.

The real reason here is that Office does not implement an unstable format that has not even gone through public review yet, since they'll need to update a bazilion installations later on. Office choses to show the calculation result, while others choose to maintain the formula which is not understood.

Robert te Kaat wrote re: ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability
on 07-05-2009 9:19

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm just saying that ODF-support in SP2 should not be understood by end-users as 'support for opening .odt-files created by other apps'. To achieve that, one needs to keep using the existing plugins, which - although not flawless - seem to be doing a pretty good job.

I agree that the standard is incomplete: e.g. spreadsheets always contain formulas, so if the standard doesn't include specs for defining formulas, it's a standard that will not improve interoperability. Every app can define its own formula-definition, thus resulting in the same vendor/product lock-in we were trying to prevent in the first place by conforming to an open standard.

Wouter wrote re: ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability
on 08-05-2009 12:56

What's even more funny is that a head of the ODF TC actually stated that 'speed is better than perfection since we want to push it through EU'

WTF?

Bart Gunneman wrote re: ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability
on 09-05-2009 15:29

yeey.... OOXML - ODF war, the battle continues....

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