Open Document Format Turns 20 (theregister.com) 30
The Open Document Format reached its 20th anniversary on May 1, marking two decades since OASIS approved the XML-based standard originally developed by Sun Microsystems from StarOffice code. Even as the format has seen adoption by several governments including the UK, India, and Brazil, plus organizations like NATO, Microsoft Office's proprietary formats remain the de facto standard.
Microsoft countered ODF by developing Office Open XML, eventually getting it standardized through Ecma International. "ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice -- a fork created after Oracle acquired Sun.
Microsoft countered ODF by developing Office Open XML, eventually getting it standardized through Ecma International. "ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice -- a fork created after Oracle acquired Sun.
How MS destroyed it (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't Office Open XML needing some 2000 pages to describe it?
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Your remember well. Microsoft did then what it does best : protect their monopoly using dirty tricks.
Re: How MS destroyed it (Score:4, Informative)
Yes and in some parts it basically says "do what word does here" because Microsoft can't understand their own code well enough to know what that is
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. I am not surprised. For a prior job, I wrote some software to handle some weird data structures. These were structs, essentially, mean to be written/read on EEPROMs we had sprinkled throughout the many PCBs in my company's devices. But because the EEPROMs were tiny, we used our own encoding/decoding schemes to pack as much as we could. For instance: instead of storing some floating point value as an IEEE-754 float32, we could instead define
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Mobrosoft gave them a deal they couldn't refuse.
Biggest heist of the 90's. (Score:1)
An open specification, with all the key bits blacked out, and bullied through by paid shills.
Those who participated in this should remove themselves from the gene pool if they have not already.
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I wish it mattered (Score:3)
Over many years, I've tried to use OpenDocument Format and failed because of Libreoffice.
Yes, I can see the irony. But ODF has remained far to closely tied with Libreoffice. It is a first-class citizen only on Libreoffice, which works well only on Linux. On MacOS, Libreoffice is terrible...with literally broken UI [libreoffice.org] as evidenced all over the internet [reddit.com]. On Windows, MS Office, even with its 365 shenanigans is so much more performant and feature rich, that the main reason anyone uses Libreoffice is because it is free (as in beer). Heck, MS Office is more performant even on MacOS compared to Libreoffice who cannot seem to get basic things like hardware acceleration right. This is the place, where they have a potential market, as Apple's own office suite is much more inferior.
Libreoffice still does not have a proper cloud based collaboration solution in 2025 that is in-built. So when it comes to business use, it is very often a deal-breaker.
The shortcomings of Libreoffice directly hurt ODF. There is a lesson to be learnt if countless users doing the most basic stuff will use a browser-based solution (Google Docs) over your suppoedly more feature rich office suite. Maybe Libreoffice is too complex for someone who can do with Google Docs and just not upto the mark for someone who needs MS Office, and stuck in that uncanny valley.
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I have no idea why you would even *need* hardware acceleration for an effing office suite.
I use Office at work. I use Word all day. When you scroll in Word, if you do not do it very slowly, Word is not able to draw the text you are scrolling. LibreOffice does not have this problem. I can scroll very quickly and the text is still displayed.
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This is a stupid argument, because every user uses a different but overlapping 10% of the features, so you can't remove many features before you start annoying a significant number of users.
Anyway, I used the presentation program (Impress or whatever it's called) to do slides for a presentation I gave for FOSSDEM a few years ago. It drove me mad in a bunch of ways. Two of the biggest ones were:
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I haven't seen that problem myself on my M1.
The only problems I had were using and Indirect function in a spreadsheet, I had to change some setting in Preferences, then it worked. The other problem was with old Mac Minis I had to set the graphical acceleration to Skia to avoid only half the screen scrolling left or right.
I definitely have no use for a cloud-based collaboration system, or for that matter a pivot table.
You do have a point though, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground spreadsheet. There use
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I definitely have no use for [...] a pivot table.
You're in luck! LibreOffice has the feature you have no use for because you apparently never need to summarize large amounts of data. It just sucks. Excel has live pivot tables. LO only has a pivot table generator. This is weird because LO obviously has most of the functionality needed to do live pivot tables, but nobody has made it do it yet. Pivot Tables are to Spreadsheets are Spreadsheets are to Personal Computers. You may not need them, but when you do, they are transformative — literally!
You do have a point though, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground spreadsheet. There used to be Microsoft Works and Apple Works.
It's ca
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Shouldn't large amounts of data be handled in a database? Or is the learning curve for a proper database too steep for most people? I certainly never learned SQL, but then I didn't need it to do my job.
Since abandoning Windows in 2019 the largest spreadsheet I've had to deal with is about 105,000 rows and AQ columns. LibreOffice on Linux had no trouble with that.
Re: I wish it mattered (Score:2)
"Shouldn't large amounts of data be handled in a database? Or is the learning curve for a proper database too steep for most people?"
I would say that it is. Having done database reporting for a living before (with Crystal reports) and using spreadsheets regularly I would say that the learning curve for using a database and other associated tools is MUCH higher. There are tools which make it relatively simple, but they are very expensive and customization is much harder.
That doesn't mean nobody should ever u
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Apple's own office suite is much more inferior.
Apple's suite is proof that anything could be worse. It's like if you told a toddler to invent a word processor and they'd never seen one before.
With LibreOffice, you linked to a bug with the tabbed interface. I didn't even know people were using it. In fact, a lot of people escaped to LibreOffice to avoid it on Microsoft's suite.
Honestly, I used LibreOffice for years without any issue. The only reason I went back to Word and Excel is because I have to support other people using it and I hate relearning
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MS Office is more performant even on MacOS compared to Libreoffice who cannot seem to get basic things like hardware acceleration right.
You hardware accelerate your documents?
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Thank you for Libreoffice! (Score:3)
No, it's just a technical specification. (Score:1)
At most, it says, "I can't afford a real office suite."
At least, that's what I was thinking when I installed LibreOffice.
RTF document format (Score:2)
I still get RTF files from time to time. Most of them I get when I buy some indie tabletop roleplaying game that comes with a free (CC licensed) hackable version of the rules.
Even though Office 365 supports .odf, I still get .docx files from people. I guess they didn't know that ODF is more widely supported (Mac, Linux, etc). And those .docx files sometimes break in weird ways in conversion and occasionally between MS Office releases.
Probably the biggest ODF based project I use is Basic Fantasy RPG [basicfantasy.org]. Which a
So what? (Score:2)
ODF is irrelevant to me as long as Libre Office is unusable.