From Our Department Of Unsurprising Things…Redmond Bureau…
Via Slashdot… Behold…the Open Document Format that Microsoft Rammed through the international standards committee…
Office 2007SP2 ODF Interoperability Very Bad
Posted by CmdrTaco
from the are-you-really-surprised dept.David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won’t read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."
ODF: The open standard file format that only Microsoft applications can use…
[Update…] In comments Jonathan Allen points out that ODF is the Oasis Group open document standard, not Microsoft’s, which is OpenXML. I was confusing the two, and the point of the Slashdot post. This isn’t about Microsoft’s own proprietary open standard. It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF. Here’s some of the Slashdot commentary…
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It’s not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1’s far from perfect, as we can see.
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That is, curiously, not quite true. ODF 1.1 doesn’t fully specify formulas, but it does specify the general syntax that should be used for them, and Microsoft seems to have ignored this. (Also, in practice, the major spreadsheets are quite similar in terms of what expressions they accept in formulas. This makes it relatively simple to convert between MS Office formulas and OpenOffice.org ones, which are what most ODF-based apps use.)
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The irony here is that the formula language used by OpenOffice (and by other vendors) is based on that used by Excel, which itself was not fully documented when OpenOffice implemented it. So an argument, by Microsoft, not to support that language because it is not documented is rather hypocritical. Excel supports 1-2-3 files and formulas and legacy Excel versions (back to Excel 4.0) neither of which have standardized formula languages. Why are these supported? Also, the fact that the Microsoft/CleverAge add-in correctly reads and writes the legacy ODF formula syntax shows not only that it can be done, but that Microsoft already has the code to do it. The inexplicably thing is why that code never made it into Excel 2007 SP2.
Just look at this. They’re in complete technical compliance, and yet if you read an ODF file format spreadsheet into Excel and then write it back out again it’s now locked utterly into MS Office’s specific implementation of ODF. You can no longer read it back into any other spreadsheet program that supports ODF, because it can’t read Microsoft’s ODF formula implementation.
They just never stop, do they? I started out as a Microsoft platforms developer. Now I work on software that runs on many different platforms and swear to God I will never again be a Microsoft only developer. I will not help them betray the promise of the personal computer. I will not help them put handcuffs on the whole goddamned world just because that’s their business model.
May 4th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
ODF was created by the Oasis group.
Microsoft’s format is OpenXML.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Ack! You’re right. I was confusing the two, and the point of the Slashdot post. This isn’t about Microsoft’s own proprietary open standard. It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF.
Look at it. They’re apparently in complete technical compliance, and yet the file format is locked utterly into MS Office once you read one into it. Nice. They just never stop.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:23 am
> It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF.
You still have it backwards. OpenOffice and KOffice are using Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactics on ODF. They are the ones adding non-standard features like spreadsheet formulas.
Microsoft is playing by the rules and not doing anything that’s not in the spec. They aren’t going to touch OpenFormula for ODF until the spec is completed. (It was promised for 2006, but now it seems like 2010 or 2011 is more likely.)
Strange reversal, isn’t it.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:19 am
"ODF 1.1 doesn’t fully specify formulas, but it does specify the general syntax that should be used for them, and Microsoft seems to have ignored this"
I wonder if this would go some way to explaining a somewhat frustrating difference between MS Excel and OpenOffice Calc syntax. Frustrating because it is basic, minor, and unavoidable if you want to do spreadsheets beyond a certain level of complexity. To refer to a cell in a different sheet in the same file, you use an address that consists of the sheet name and cell ID. In MS Excel the format for this is "Sheet1!A1" while in OOo Calc the format is "Sheet1.A1" – the difference is obvious.
AAAARGH!
Personally I don’t give a rat’s ass whether it was OOo or MS that chose to use such a trifling minor difference in syntax, I just wish they hadn’t – it makes as much sense as a chocolate teapot. However they did, and so now whenever I want to create a spreadsheet and send it to someone I know is using MS Excel I have to make the spreadsheet twice – once to make sure it all works, than a copy replacing one single character over and over and over again. Thank fuck for the search & replace function!