Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week 264
Posted
by
timothy
from the file-formats-matter dept.
from the file-formats-matter dept.
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.
Requires .EXE Download (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:4, Informative)
It does not. It works with plain old JS and CSS in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on Mac/PC.
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:2, Informative)
If you want to go through the same hassle to open local files you go though with other online office suites, it is not required.
Re:More to the point (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is it safe? (Score:3, Informative)
I think it will be hard for MS to start charging for the free version consider there not much to the free version anyway.
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:1, Informative)
As evidenced by this discussion and the plethora of "where does shit go?" options in the beta...
Microsoft's offering is fucking convoluted as hell.
Also, while an EXE may be required to sync documents. At this time, near as I can tell... You can't^h^h^h^h^h aren't allowed to create new documents on their service without installing it.
Re:This has nothing to do with OOXML. (Score:2, Informative)
No, XAML is the new HTML. At least if Microsoft get its way. Get thee to Wikipedia and read. It's very comprehensive. Put the blinders on if you wish, but don't say I didn't warn you. .NET is subservient to XAML. .NET is an effort to herd the corporate developers to XAML. XAML has always underlied .NET.
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:5, Informative)
You aren't allowed to create new documents on their service without installing it.
Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass! (Score:3, Informative)
su changes to another (priveleged, presumably) user and requires that user's password
sudo merely allows you elevated privileges based on your own account and does not require sharing a password. Changes made are still logged as being done by you, ownership doesn't change, etc. It is less of a security risk than su since you don't have to share the password of a priveleged account.
Re:Don't forget GUID. (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft used it once to track down a virus writer. You may remember that case. But what it boils down to is that Office "called home" and reported to Microsoft what this person's GUID was. And Microsoft looked it up in their database to find the person who originally authored a Word macro virus.
This is false - though typical Slashdotist - anti-Microsoft hysteria.
What actually happened was simple, old-fashioned police work. The original upload of Melissa was tracked to a newsgroup posting, which was subsequently tracked to an IP address belong to an AOL account. The police got the logs for that account from AOL, identified the address of the number that dialed into it, and then arrested the resident along with seizing their computer.
The only role the GUID played was as supporting evidence that the document containing Melissa was, in fact, created on the computer that they had seized. It was also used fairly extensively throughout the computing world to identify other viruses that had been written by the same author, as they all had the same GUID.
No phoning home. No centralised database of Office users. No conspiracy.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Informative)
I concur. I make programs that generate documents based on some of these 'open' standards.
- LaTeX is really the only thing you can trust if you want an editable text document. However (sadly) outside of scientific literature it's hardly used.
- PDF and PostScript is great if you want a read only document, it works but I don't think it's really an open standard. It's more of a form of output, not really a form of carrying information.
- ODF is an open standard and works really well but sadly not all editors interpret all tags the same.
- OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser, you can generate documents programmatically according to the OOXML standard but a lot of the functionality (simple things like hyperlinks) will be misinterpreted by Microsoft Office and possibly corrupt the document (unreadable to all) if re-saved in Office.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't the contents of .docx files tied to the (proprietary, closed, secret, patented) algorithms within MS Word?
For example, you may be able to retrieve the text (not sure) but getting your formatting to look exactly like it did in MS Word, will require MS Word.
If you want proof, find another word processing app that can display it 100% compatible with MS Word without calling any code from MS Word.
Now explain how in 25 years time when most people vaguely remember what MS Word 2010 looked like or did, you will somehow open your .docx documents and have them look as they do now. If I know Microsoft at all, I know that the OOXML "Standard" will change (read: "extend") a LOT in 25 years.
Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass! (Score:3, Informative)
Screw that. Fancy Graphical Newsletters should be created in Scribus not OO Draw.
Parent IS NOT "informative". (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More to the point (Score:2, Informative)
Dude! Repeat after me: "<p> </p> and <br /> work on Slashdot". Geez!
Hitting [ENTER] works well too, and Slashdot will auto-convert it to the appropriate HTML for you. Choose your message options as "Plain Old Text" which also allows you to insert links, style it bold or italic, quote text, insert ordered or unordered lists, and so on. Who the hell manually enters paragraph or line break tags on Slashdot anymore?
Re:Is it safe? (Score:4, Informative)
Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.
The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.
Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.
And as for formats like .doc and so on... no. Just, no.
But as bad as format issues are...
Storage media is worse.
You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.
That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:3, Informative)
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If PDF/A [wikipedia.org] is being used, I'd say your chances are pretty darn good that the files will be accessible in twenty-five years. From the wiki page: audio, video, javascript, and encryption are not allowed in PDF/A files. Use of standardized metadata is mandated, and *all* fonts used must be embedded. IOW it's a simplified, well defined file format.
On RTF- it's a subset. (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft will offer a product which does some of what Office 2010 does but which does not offer key features and does not offer 24/7 uptime.
There is no promise to support the product for any particular time, so based on past history, the product will change every 3-4 years and at least once per decade, prior data will become unsupported to lesser or greater degrees.
I really disliked office 2010. I can buy it for $10 if I want to. It was slower and it was unable to print a lot of my complicated office 2003 documents. On loading them into Openoffice 3.0, I noticed that office 2003 had allowed a lot of overlapping tables and graphic files which a test showed was the problem. Since neither office 2003 nor office 2010 DISPLAYED the frikkin graphic or table boundaries there was no way I could fix this issue in Office.
So I converted all the documents to OpenOffice. Took me about 8 hours for the first 100 pages.. then once i understood OO sections, I got it down to about 2 hours per 100 pages for the rest.
Still have to use Office at work. I can even buy a full copy for $20 for home use if I want. But really don't want to go back now.
I dislike the office 2010 ribbons and approach to formatting documents and working with tables.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:3, Informative)
If you are discussing OOXML Standard
Then there are two : ECMA-376 which Word 2010 supports (But so does Word 2007 and OpenOfficeOrg)
and : ISO/IEC 29500 which Word 2010 does not support .... and neither does anything else (Microsoft are "working towards" the standard)