Microsoft Office 2007 to Support ODF - But Not OOXML

Andy Updegrove writes "About two hours ago, Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format. Not until Office 14 is released (no date given so far for that) will anyone be able to buy an OOXML ISO-compliant version. Why will Microsoft do this after so many years of refusal? Perhaps because the only way it can deliver a product to government customers that meets an ISO/IEC document format standard is by finally taking the plunge, and supporting 'that other format.' Still, many questions remain, such as when this upgrade will actually be released, how good a job it will do, and whether the API Microsoft has said it will make available to permit developers to supply 'save to ODF' default plugins will be supported by a patent non-assertion promise allowing implementations under the GPL (the upgrade supplied by Microsoft will not allow ODF as the default setting)."

OOXML is not an ISO standard

[lkcl]

well - only if microsoft is able to buy their way through the standards process will anyone be able to buy an OOXML ISO-compliant version.

UKUUG is currently waiting on the UK judicial system to decide whether to do a judicial review of the British Standards Institute's recent decision to ratify OOXML.

clonking "comments" together in blocks of 100 for vote "yes no", towards the end of the (only) 5 day process, smells a bit fishy. especially as the comments weren't actually reviewed as having been actioned / corrected (in the 6,000 page document).

the BSI came up with something ridiculous like 900 comments on the 6,000 page document.

it's all incredibly fishy - long story. far too much to fit into one silly slashdot comment, so i'll stop.

Re:Victory

[peragrin]

Well they won't be able to call it ODF, but unless someone complains MSFt will anyways.

Sort of like how SCO still claims to own UNIX when the Open group owns the trademark, and Novell owns the copyrights.

Correction on "save to" capability

[Andy Updegrove]

Kevin J. O'Brien, reporting in the International Herald Tribune [iht.com], reports that the ODF update will in fact permit users to "adjust Office 2007 settings to automatically save documents in the rival format." A knowledgeable source tells me that this report is likely to be accurate.

Andy

They walk on ice.

[kiehlster]

This is happening because the negative attention they've gotten recently. Office 2007 has gotten a bad review thanks to a over-thought user interface, so they hired an Adobe UI guru [news.com] to correct that. OOXML hasn't gotten any acceptance from the community so introducing it now will just further the negativity. I'm sure this move toward ODF is to bring more approval as they scrap Office 2007 and bring something better in version 14. By then they'll try to put some positive spin on OOXML as they release a better interface and incorporate OOXML.

Re:Not embrace and extend, but embrace and squeeze

[CastrTroy]

Well, I guess the answer to that is, if you want a format that maintains your formatting perfectly down to the pixel across all implementations of the standard, then you had better go with PDF (or TIFF). But if you want a format you can easily edit and pass between colleagues, without worrying too much about how the formatting is going to be a little off, then go with ODF, DOC, or some other word processing format. No word processing format looks the same across all platforms. Even something as simple as using a different printer can cause problems with the same version of MS Word opening it's own doc files. If formatting is so important that you can' have things be moved around a little bit, then use PDF.

Re:They walk on ice.

[truthsearch]

"Retail sales of Office products from January through June [2007] were roughly double those of Office 2003 during its first six months on the market and up 59.6 percent from Office sales for the first six months of [2006]" - Source [cnet.com]

Not exactly the failure you describe.

Re:Victory

[prockcore]

Nonsense, ODF has it written in the spec to allow proprietary extensions. MS can add whatever they want and still call it ODF.

A bit misleading

[harlows_monkeys]

The summary is a bit misleading. Current Office 2007 documents fail to validate as transitional OOXML because of some very minor differences. For example, the final standard changed an attribute value from "yes/no" to "true/false".

All major ODF implementations, including OpenOffice, fail to validate against ISO ODF 1.0 for similar reasons.

Thus, to make some big deal of Microsoft not immediately slipstreaming in an update to Office to 100% conform to OOXML, while ignoring the fact that OpenOffice still doesn't fully conform to ODF so long after ODF 1.0 was ratified is a bit hypocritical.

What happens to OXML?

[Anonymous Coward]

OXML was put on the fast track for being accepted as an international standard. The fast track is intended only to be used for protocols that are already a de facto standard. Microsoft are now admitting that they do not support it themselves, and certainly no one else does. Logically, it should therefore be withdrawn as a standard and, possibly, be resubmitted through the normal route.

Re:Typical Tactic

[Anonymous Coward]

The announcement also says they'll release API's to make it simple to change to ODF as the default.

There's a surprising lack of spin in the announcement. In fact it almost seems begrudging.

OOXML won't be supported in MS Office till Office 14 and who knows when that will show up?

Will be in Office 2007 SP2, link to press release

[quazee]

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormatsPR.mspx [microsoft.com]

Also, ODF will be allowed to be configured as the default format for documents.
SP2 will also include support for PDF and XPS export.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

can't create reality with your keyboard, twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

So really twitter, all you do is post trolls with your negative karma accounts and create openings for your other sockpuppets to post essentially the same thing, but with... wait for it... links. This thread [slashdot.org] is exactly the same. You've really figured out how to game the moderation system, haven't you?

It doesn't make sense when you say it as twitter, and it doesn't make sense when you say it as Erris, gnutoo, Mactrope, inTheLoo, westbake, willeyhill or Odder or any other of your personalities.

Also, talk about not caring if someone figures out that you're the same person, all your links are pasted from twiter's lame journal of the past few days. I mean, as if Robert Scoble (who I'm sure had lots of credibility for you when he worked for Microsoft) posting a one-liner to twitter (irony) saying he's not going to drop $400 on Office means anything at all.

Re:Q: Will this signal the end of Excel dominance?

[Bryansix]

Actually Word 2003 can open docx already with the free compatibility pack. It just can't open dotx files which is pretty annoying.

Re:eee

[prockcore]

The web is a bad example.. mainly because it's a mess. The standards are convoluted and poorly documented. There is no reference implementation.

and all of our advancements were the result of 3rd party extensions of the standard.

AJAX was invented by MS, not by a standards body. The canvas tag was invented by Apple. Both are widely supported standards now that have a marked improvement over what the w3c is pushing.

Re:Victory

[shentino]

Actually, no matter what extensions they write, they must remain compatible with the base standard.

If you break the standard in the process of adding an extension, then you are in violation of the standard.

I almost thought Micro$oft went good

[jopsen]

"About two hours ago, Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format.

I almost thought Microsoft went good... but then it came:

Not until Office 14 is released (no date given so far for that) will anyone be able to buy an OOXML ISO-compliant version.

But they had me there for a moment... Just for 2 secound I actually thought they were going to do something good - without a ulterior motive... But they're still implementing OOXML in the future...

Re:To be in control of their own future

[jdeisenberg]

"IBM has 2 people on the payroll who's sole purpose is to trash OOXML (Rob Weir and PJ)."

Incorrect. Rob Weir is also a contributor to the ODF specification (see appendix H here [oasis-open.org] and is co-chair of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Technical Committee, so he does more than just "trash OOXML."

Re:Victory

[_Sprocket_]

Microsoft Bob.

Re:Sinking Ship.

[fosterNutrition]

You missed the ~ at the end of the sentence. In case you haven't seen the sigs and small discussions about it, the tilde (~) has been repurposed to indicate sarcasm.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[firefly4f4]

I believe -- but am not certain -- that the ODF spec specifies that the extension should not be "dropped", rather just ignored.

In saving the document, though, a compliant application should preserve the ignored extensions though.

Re:An Empire in Rapid Decline, said Time Magazine.

[holloway]

All we really need, then, is an ACID test for ODF, in which we can show that OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, and even isolated projects like AbiWord and Gnumeric do better than Office, thus shaming Microsoft into doing it right. That assumes they don't get it right the first time, although that does seem unlikely.

This is what Rob Weir has proposed [opendocume...owship.com] (he's an ODF chair).

Re:Victory

[holloway]

The ODF spec says that,

"An implementation shall be accompanied by a document that defines all implementation-defined and locale-specific characteristics and all extensions."

(emphasis mine)

So there's what you ask from MS Office.

Re:A bit misleading

[harlows_monkeys]

here [idippedut.dk].

Microsoft IS allowing ODF to be the default

[I'm Don Giovanni]

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/rss.xml [msdn.com]

"And of course users can set ODF to be the default format if they wish, the same way they would for other Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats."

Re:A bit misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

I call this misleading:

"All major ODF implementations, including OpenOffice, fail to validate against ISO ODF 1.0 for similar reasons."

The truth is quite simple: All major ODF implementations produce ODF 1.1(!!) documents.

And they validate against 1.1.

If you validate a 1.1 document with a 1.0 based validator it WILL fail. OFCOURSE.

Yeez. Please understand reality before you insult ODF implementors. They are doing the right thing.

Re:Sinking Ship.

[MadKeithV]

"you know we said you should use word because it looks the same on every computer"

If your company said that then whoever made that particular decision is a total moron. Even changing PRINTERS completely fubars the layout on MS Word. If layout was the customer's requirement then MS Word is just about the last choice on the planet.

Re:Sinking Ship.

[TheRaven64]

Say what you will, this is a good thing. It'll expand the reach of ODF, which is an excellent format.

No, ODF is a terrible format. Its one redeeming feature is that it sucks less than OXML. I suspect that Microsoft have worked out that they can fully support ODF quite easily and implement their own extensions for things (multiple numbered list styles, highlighting, annotations, and so on) that are not supported by ODF and force everyone else to go back to reverse engineering Microsoft formats.

FUD

[MickDownUnder]

This isn't new. The plugin has been available from....

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

for quite some time...

Note the contributors...

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/#contributors [sourceforge.net]

Whilst Microsoft has funded this project, it was not directly developed by microsoft, it has been developed by independent developers, as it is open source, anyone can inspect the code, including you.

There has been so much disinformation about the whole OOXML/ODF its really been quite impressive.