Guest post by OpenOffice 3.2 has been released featuring faster load times and a host of new features. The OpenOffice team have made version 3.2 of the open source office suite for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris available to download. It offers numerous enhancements over its predecessor which offer both stability and speed benefits.
Recent analysis of fonts installed on user’s systems in Germany have lead to a conclusion that an OpenOffice variant is installed on over 21% of PCs in Germany, with an uncertainty of 0.5%. Internationally the market share of OpenOffice isn’t as high, but nevertheless it is apparently starting to make significant inroads into Microsoft’s Office suite share. Perhaps this OpenOffice 3.2 new version will help to further that trend.
I’ve been finding OpenOffice to be fine for my daily use.
Since Microsoft changed the UI in Office 2007 and on, and doesn’t provide a way to go back to the old UI… I’ve switched to OO and sold off my Office 2007.
I have a legal copy of Office 2003, but I’m not using it any more.
I’ve also been putting OO on my families computers and nobody has complained.
I’ve been doing the same… with only minor complaints
(often times, I just have to help someone find where a certain feature/setting that matches what they’re used to in MS Office)
For me, I use an office suite very seldom these days anyway. I will occasionally use a word processor, but I don’t need very many features.
Spreadsheets are nice, but even Google Apps works in a pinch.
The other day I used OOo’s presentation tool to create a poster…
All-in-all, it does the job. For me, it’s a bit overkill, but since I use it so seldom, and my machine is reasonably fast, I don’t mind so much.
Still no Ribbon? I’m sorry, this is 2010, not 1997. My Office 2010 is working like a charm.
I’m glad you like the ribbon interface, and it thrills me no end that Office 2010 “is working like a charm.” One thing to keep in mind though, as Microsoft’s EULA clearly states, it is not YOUR Office 2010.
What are you saying here? You completely own OpenOffice when you download a copy? You are free to modify and redistribute it in any way you see fit?
Exactly.
And I hate the ribon.
Sadly, Excel is still “smarter” than Calc.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/To-Dos
Looks like OO 3.3 feature freeze end of March.
The pending patch list currently for Calc is large:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?issue_type=PATCH&compon…
Here, here. A cold death in hell to whoever designed that awful thing. A keyboard user’s nightmare.
The Ribbon is not a keyboard user’s nightmare. It is very accessible for keyboard users.
So I can modify it and distribute it in binary form? I can change all the branding to my own and sell it as my work?
Excellent! JakeOffice, here i come!
Certainly.
You can modify it, and sell binaries under any brand you wish for any price you can get, as long as you do not violate the terms of the license by denying the recipients the rights they have under the license.
The LGPL nowhere forbids selling of binaries under a different name.
It just states, that any recipient of the software has the same rights as you have. Yust fair!
Are you a real person, or are you playing a role? Because your comments seem too stupid to be real.
What exactly is stupid? Please tell me how my statement is false in any way.
You don’t own OpenOffice when you download a copy. It comes with a license that limits what you can do with it. Perhaps you are unaware of this?
OpenOffice is licensed under LGPL, you do own the copy you download, and you can redistribute it in the way you seem fit.
Hmmm so I can make modifications, strip the license, call it “Professional OpenOffice” and charge $50 for it?
Star Office
The software is yours not the name OpenOffice, you can call it Nt_jerkface’ Professional Office and charge anything you’d like.
No limitations on modifications and distribution?
Maybe you should take another look at the lgpl.
OpenOffice is licensed under LGPL v3.
http://about.openoffice.org/#licenses
This is a very good license, since it allows re-distribution (without modification) embedded within a commercial package, and it also allows re-distribution with or without modifications as open source.
This makes it a zillion times better license than that of Microsoft Office, which allows for no re-distribution at all.
You can’t strip the license, but you can certainly make modifications, call it whatever you please (except Openoffice), distribute it as open source and charge whatever you want.
Or, you could embed its core libraries unchanged in your own commercial wrapper, call it whatever you please (except Openoffice), distribute it as a closed source binary executable only and charge whatever you want.
Go right ahead. Good luck with that.
I was being sardonic.
I’m quite aware of the limitations of the LGPL, and those limitations underly my point.
You can’t do whatever you want with OpenOffice. There are limitations that come with the license.
Of course there are … you didn’t write the OpenOffice code, therefore it isn’t yours.
Given that it isn’t yours, the license it comes under gives you absolutely fantastic rights and freedoms.
No, indeed I agree, you shouldn’t be modded down for telling the truth.
However, perhaps you were modded down for trying to put a negative spin on something that is actually very positive.
I don’t know … I didn’t mod you down.
Edited 2010-02-14 07:33 UTC
Just like the case of Microsoft Office, you down’t own OpenOffice, you have a licenced copy. The difference is what these licences allows you to do.
In the case of OpenOffice it allows you to modify and redistribute it and even charge $50 for it provided you also make the source code available to the people who bought it.
However, you are not allowed to change the licensng terms unless you own the rights to the software in question.
No. If it had been in the public domain that would have been true but since it’s LGPL you have to follow the license. Granted it is more liberal than most commercial licenses but it’s not a “any way you seem fit” license.
Sure it is more liberal but you still don’t own the software when you download it. You still follow a license.
Thus I shouldn’t have been modded down for pointing this out.
So it must have been 1997 up until 2007 for MS then, eh?.
… support for OTF fonts. With that problem fixed, people can finally be sure that if they’ve got a font installed on their computer, that it will work properly with OpenOffice. The speedups and the new spreadsheet features are nice too.
Edited 2010-02-12 19:03 UTC
I can certainly vouch for the extra speed of 3.2. I can’t vouch for the extra stability, as 3.1.1 was stable for me.
I work at a church, and it switched to OpenOffice over a year ago. The church officers have begun changing to OpenOffice from a mixture of Word (various vintages) and Works. OpenOffice is more than adequate for the kinds of work we do here.
I use Linux, and began using it when Star Office ruled the roost, and people were desperate to get Word Perfect ported to their particular distribution. Word Perfect never caught on, and Star Office became proprietary, so for a few months I remember there was no significant free office suite for Linux, until this thing called OpenOffice showed up in 2002.
I never liked the interface of Star Office, and Word Perfect’s stability issues under Windows were such that I never trusted the Linux port. OpenOffice was slow, and a little klutzy, but it got the job done. People have criticized it for for not being Microsoft Office, for being bloated, for not being original, and for lacking features.
Over the years I have watched a bunch of rough edges smoothed and some features added. What we have now is a fast(er), capable, smooth program that still gets the job done. People may claim with some justification that Microsoft’s product is smoother, or has certain features that OpenOffice lacks (The reverse is also true), but at churches, we are mindful of a certain word, “stewardship.” Aside from its theological aspects, it also means you don’t spend money when you don’t need to.
OpenOffice eliminates one reason for spending money.
Office suites have become a commodity.
I used OO,Lotus123, Wordperfect, Ami, Quartto, MS, etc,
etc for DOS/Windows/Os2/MacOS/BeOS/Linux for the past 30 years. They become interchangable with little downtime to learn. MS ribbons is a screwed up failure. Since OO is free! its a big motivation to use for new PCs at home especially netbooks which will grow in number.
Certainly a great product for educational/state/fed agencies to reduce costs without paying and ARM and leg to Microsoft.
I am on a mac and I keep it installed incase I need to do something with it. But for the most part it doesn’t feel ‘right’ here. It has subtle redraw issues, and the keyboard commands aren’t consistent with the rest of the system in some cases (for example, CMD-Left doesn’t go to the beginning of a line).
I usually end up using Pages and Numbers for most things. But of course they can’t be used for all applications.
fn+left arrow does if your keyboard have an fn key, it feel consistant for me, as the fn+left = home key, fn + right = end, so it is as any text editor in any operating system, not just mac, but including mac.
That’s not consistent with OS X keyboard behavior. Home and end have different behaviors in OS X, they scroll the view to the top or bottom of a document respectively without moving your cursor. Cmd+left and cmd+right are beginning/end of line. OO on the Mac doesn’t fit with these behaviors, instead keeping a more conventional behavior for the home and end keys and not responding to cmd+left/right at all.
And still with an update function so bad, most users will never see it.
Not met a single regular user has ever updated their version of OpenOffice.
Remember when downloading it from the website was like playing darts? (getfirefox.com changed that)
OpenOffice is a mess. A complete, unrepairable mess that^aEURTMs barely good enough and only succeeds because it^aEURTMs free (and Office is overpriced).
I something else free crops up that does the job better and wipes OOo out because I^aEURTMm sick of trying to explain its insane UI and quirks to people.
I put Linux Mint on my uncles friend’s computer and they use OpenOffice a lot. That was over 6 months ago and I’ve not heard about a single problem.
I should probably file your statement under, usual knows what’s best for users but really doesn’t.
Lol! Dude, that’s nasty! Can’t we all just get along? ;-D
Anyway, I’m not surprised update works fine with Linux as that really handy repository model makes updating applications a breeze. With OOo on windows, the updater suck big hairy man balls! Seriously, it’s never worked for me. Everytime I run the bloody thing, and no matter the changes I make to firewall or any other security measure, it still come out with an error message.
Basically I have a choice here. I can regularly visit the OOo website and wait for an update or wait for OSAlert to post about one.
So yeah, the interface may or may not be to your liking but until the bloody update mechanism starts working properly, OOo on windows is missing what for me is an essential part of the package.
It has an updater on Windows? I didn’t even notice it
However anytime is see the OOo system icon tray, I kill it and try to make sure it doesn’t autostart again. Why waste resources on something you use a couple times a month?
On another note, I wish KOffice would learn to handle .doc
KOffice has handled .doc for years, in most circumstances fairly well and sometimes not so well or really bad all depending on the complexity of the .doc.
The quality has increased a lot the last year and it will continue to increase due to the combined effort of the KOffice developers and Nokia. Nokia has created a document viewer for the Maemo platform based on KOffice code.Part of the projects goals is to help KOffice mature its loading and rendering of MSOffice documents.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/09/17/office-viewer-for-maemo5…
This is a good thing.
Last I tried (2.0.0 I think), it didn’t handle tables or something common like that.
It worked well in 1.6.*, but since 2.*, I never successfully opened any .doc document without segfault. I hope stability will come back, because once it work fine with .doc, I will uninstall OOo.
Maybe it^aEURTMs wonderful on Linux but OOo feels like something out of 1994 on Windows.
I guess that’s an unacceptable opinion here since you were modded down. It seems that OSAlert has picked up all the FOSS nutters from Slashdot that are now laughed at there.
Anyways I agree with you comment, OpenOffice looks like it is from the 90’s, especially when compared to MS Office. It really needs a UI refresh.
OpenOffice is good for the price but if I had to work with office documents all day I would get tired of it pretty quickly. OpenOffice is good for non-profits that operate on shoestring budgets but the typical business shouldn’t bother.
Edited 2010-02-14 00:56 UTC
I would say that the whole concept of an Office suit is so 1990:s or perhaps even 1890:s. It is very centred around documents and how documents look on paper. They are sort of computerized typewriters and adding machines.
With the increasing amount of information we handle today we need ways to tag,search, modify and manage information that goes cross document boundaries. We need ways to collaborate and work interactively with existing information system wide. This is something that current office suits are not very good at.
In a way the old 1970 unix “everyting is a file” , and usually a plain text file strategy would be more fruitful in the modern information landscape. Perhaps with the exception that we now have things like XML that could help us mark up our data. In this world there was an orthogonality between data and the tools that was used to handle them. The output of almost any tool/program could be piped to another tool to refine the result.
I would think that things like Google wave and Nepomuk would have a lot more to give when it comes to office work efficiency than the Microsoft Ribbon and other minor look and feel changes.
Edited 2010-02-14 15:27 UTC
And still with an update function so bad, most users will never see it.
Agreed. It’d be nice if there was something similar like under Linux; an application which downloads the list of available software from a repository and handles updating them all. OOo and other could just then instead bundle the installer for that with their main installer, install both and let it handle the updating in the future.
As I replied to Kroc, I use Abiword for wordprocessing and Gnumeric for my shreadsheet work, whenever I need it. I prefer nimple and smaller in size.
In openSUSE, all you have to do is add their openoffice repo and updates are easy. They show up blue in YaST, just like every other package that has an update.
In your opinion … an opinion apparently not at all shared by a significant number of bodies with considerably more combined credibility than a solitary Internet poster:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deplo…
http://www.solidoffice.com/openoffice/nyc/
OpenOffice is climbing slowly above 10% market share, and has reached as high as 20% in some countries.
That represents a very large number of users, probably well over 40 million and maybe as many as 100 million, who apparently don’t believe it is any kind of a mess at all.
Edited 2010-02-13 12:33 UTC
how many people use windows, internet explorer, insert ur commonly hated software here, and believe its a mess?
same thing for open office.
Get real.
for home use its ok. when you start to really get stuff done, it sucks. the update is just one thing among others.
It doesn’t feel at all in the spirit of the usual opensource competition and way of doing things right, probably because no decent programmer has any interest into coding a damn office suite. (we use Latex and VIM)
most are forced to use Ooo at work, because it was much cheaper than MS office, btw. Not really a choice or smth like that. And at home, why buy the so expensive MS suite to write school docs ? openoffice shines here too.. but it doesn’t make it technically good. Far from it.
Most programmers use MS Office just like most professionals.
The real problem is that it takes more than a decent programmer to create an office suite. It takes a team of them with someone at the top who has a good plan.
if i could mod up 10 times i’d do it.
it’s time people wake up and fix this horrible office suite
Add another voice that says OpenOffice is a mess.
I tried to abandon Microsoft Office 2004 on the Mac, and I have for the most part… but not to OpenOffice. I use Mellel and Pages for my major word processing/basic layout needs.
Ideally, the open source world would wake up to the reality of Bean, probably the greatest open source word processing app ever made. It’s awesome. I use it a lot. Fast, growing feature set, beautifully designed, small, focused. It is not robust enough to do a massive term paper, but it is making steady progress.
I’ve always thought Open Office might instantly improve if they just split ’em up.
As for Bean, I had never heard of it, but a quick google, says that it is not cross platform and fairly limited, which puts it in a different market than Office and OO.o.
I am sure that for macro writing business users there are compelling reasons to stay with Office (if only momentum), but it wasn’t too long ago that most home users I know had a copy of Office on their home PC, and I seriously doubt that an Office license would be worth while for many of them with OO.o as an alternative today.
Also, for me anyway, I don’t find that OO.o really competes with LaTeX for my use, they both do different things well and complement each other, much as one does not think of typewriters and printing presses competing.
A touch over-board mate.
Particularly the point about OOo’s UI given it’s a clone of MSOffice’s pre-ribbon UI.
I use Abiword for wordprocessing and Gnumeric for my shreadsheet work, whenever I need it. I prefer nimple and smaller in size.
Abiwoed, gnumeric and you left out lyx which is for anyone who’s truly serious about publishing.
oowriter handles reading others’ docs better (with revision tracking especially) and there’s not really a replacement for ooimpress for viewing slides.
That being said I’m surprised about all the whining about openoffice’s UI. People spend most of their time using a web browser and writing email. Office suite software…not so much.
The time of big innovation for office suites is long gone. Most all meaningful innovation was during the wordstar/appleworks to office95 transition. In comparison the last 15 years has just been tweaking, some of that of questionable value.
I’m still amazed anyone can charge more than $100 for such ancient technology and still be in business.
Hmm, you must know a lot of stupid or hard-headed people.
I installed OpenOffice on several computers all belonging to the same family 4 years ago and I do keep them updated.
Guess what they’ve never asked me to do – install MS Office. And these aren’t techy people – Dad’s a 70 yr old pharmacist, Mom’s lifelong homemaker with a highschool education who runs a small import clothing sideline, Mimi’s a single mom of 2 boys who holds down several part-time jobs.
Their newest PC is a P4 and they are quite surprised that the updates get better on the same aging hardware.
It’s true that their needs aren’t complicated but, it does show that OpenOffice is good enough for some (really) average users, and, if so, why should they pay for Microsoft Office bloatware when good-enough is free.
That said, I wish the OOo devs would find or fix the problem with large spreadsheets that George Ou reported – it’s now been several years and Gnumeric can work with the same sheets much better and stably than Calc.
I never thought I’ve ever say this but the OOo team has truly made an improvement in start-up times without the need for a start-up agent. Literally OOo Writer and OOo Calc “nearly” match MS Office start-up times and I have them both installed. Next thing to work on is their GUI.
I installed OpenOffice 3.2 on my new laptop and it is surprisingly fast on Windows 7. Way to go OpenOffice community. Thank you for speed improvements.
Just another piece of information relating to this would be the release of Lotus Symphony Beta 2:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/SymphonyBetaHome….
I’m running it on my Mac and it is absolutely gorgeous. If OpenOffice.org developers want a new UI for the next version then they should look no further than what IBM has done in Lotus Symphony.
http://i990.photobucket.com/albums/af23/kawaiigardiner/SymphonyMacO…
As for OpenOffice.org 3.2 – I’ve tried it out on OpenSolaris, Linux, Windows and Mac; it is definitely a massive leap forward in terms of performance and reliability but I am disappointed that there is a bibliographical facility and yet the problem is there is no way to insert the information into the document and select the style of citation one wishes to use. For me at university I use the Chicago style and there is no way to specify the style or even setup a rule/macro that automatically styles it the way I want it. I do hope in the future that they do address this short coming because it is really the only reason I hold onto Microsoft Office – if they finally sorted the bibliographical feature out I’d happy move to OpenOffice.org.
Edited 2010-02-13 00:12 UTC
Symphony looks nicer on the mac, but is definitely slower. They seem to be using eclipse as a base instead of ooo.
They’re using a combination of an old fork of ooo and eclipse together; I personally don’t find the performance too bad when compared to OpenOffice.org and one also has to realise that it is a beta version of Symphony which I provided a link to. I don’t want the ooo developers to embrace Symphony whole sale but I see nothing wrong with them at least embracing the UI and recreating it on OpenOffice.org.
I use OpenOffice all the time for work on my Intel Mac. Writer is good and it translates Word docments well – except, visually, bullets, but actually not as logically or as cleanly as I have found Pages to do, which gives me page breaks and other formatting information immediately, so that I can have an overview of what’s really going on in the document. It also has some (for me) weird defaults (automatic numbering for one – which I generally dislike in any application); Calc has had some serious issues in the recent past with certain calculations not showing on print, which is seriously bad for a business environment. Indeed, on the whole, I only return to the Microsft Office suite at all for Excel.
But the biggest peeve of all is the fact that there’s no British English download seemingly of 3.2 for Intel Mac. C’mon, not all Anglophones speak or write American English, guys….You manage this distinction for Windows and Linux, and even Portuguese on Intel Mac: why no British English (or English, as I prefer to call it)…?
Here a complete list of available mac downloads.
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/
They are listed as RC because some like PPC versions haven’t had enough testing but the latest RC is the final release.
OK, saw these and the RC status, and wasn’t certain of what that meant regarding “completeness” in real life terms: thanks very much for the clarification.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/openoffice/
300,000,000 Downloads is not to be sneezed at. Microsoft estimate an installed base of Office (all versions) at 400,000,000.
With OpenOffice now estimated as being installed on somewhere between 10% and 20% (call it an even 15%) of PCs worldwide, OpenOffice is now starting to get into the same market share territory where Firefox began to hurt IE.
The rate of increase of uptake of OpenOffice hasn’t been anywhere near that of Firefox, but nevertheless it may still be a case of slow and steady wins the race here.
I’m wondering when the tipping point will be reached when Office will need to achieve correct compatibility with ODF, similar to the way that IE has slowly started to get compatibility with W3C web standards.
If a few more governments start to insist on open standard formats which are not limited to a single source supplier, that tipping point may not be that far off.
http://www.odfalliance.org/blog/index.php/site/microsofts_odf_suppo…
http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/02/odf-format-for-danish-governmen…
http://jan.wildeboer.net/2010/01/denmark-goes-odf-only-odf-sorry-oo…
http://www.odfalliance.org/blog/index.php/site/odf_brazil_workshop/
http://www.odfalliance.org/blog/index.php/site/new_odf_interoperabi…
http://www.odfalliance.org/blog/index.php/site/odf_ukgovoss/
office 2k7 to my knwoledge has correct odf support
the problem just is that the odf-standard is so incomplete that it leads to all kinds of problems
ooxml is an open standard too
Not at all. All of the other programs that implement ODF achieve far, far better interoperability than MS Office does. Even the Sun plugin for MS Office, and the newage plugin for MS Office, both achieve a far better result. By miles.
Everyone else seems to be able to implement ODF and achieve good interoperability, even when implementing it in conjunction with MS Office legacy interoperability, even when implementing it as a plugin for MS Office. Why can’t Microsoft? Why is it that only Microsoft’s ODF implementation is utterly borked?
BTW … ODF has compliance tests. You know, checks that can assess if a software product is actually producing correct ODF files. Yes, it is indeed Microsoft’s implementation of ODF that is borked, and not everyone else’s.
However, everything that OOXML references (e.g. sub-formats used by OOXML, such as WMF for scalable vector graphics) is Microsoft proprietary.
The result is a perfectly open specification specifying perfectly closed, proprietary, obscured-format office files (which is why governments around the world are rejecting OOXML in favour of ODF).
Another observation to make here is that OpenOffice achieves immensely better interoperability (even with other MS Office versions) that MS Office does.
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.2/#general_file
Edited 2010-02-13 12:42 UTC
ineroperability and standards-compliance are 2 different things when the standard is lousy
iirc oasis even admitted that odf 1.2 is f–ked up and most of the incompatibilities will be dealt with in 1.3
maybe in 5 years odf will be at a somewhal useable level…
indeed.
write a doc in koffice, save as odt, open in Ooo.. its a mess
write in Ooo, open in koffice its a mess.. same story with abiword, ms office and you can make any combination of them
ODF is underspecified, if it needs to deal with an implementor whose explicit goal is to have as LITTLE interoperability as possible: Microsoft.
For players who actually want to interoperate it is good enough, and becomes even better with ODF 1.2.
So the only thing for which Microsoft is useful in the ODF landscape ist detection of underspecified stuff in ODF.
I hope OpenOffice gets beyond 50% soon, as this would definitely help with Microsoft’s interoperability work.
You can compete with “bad and gratis”, but you can’t compete with “good and gratis”, if your business needs licensing fees for survival.
Inertia and lock-in will keep Microsoft Office going for a long time to come, but eventually it will go the way of WordPerfect.
With the momentum that ODF is gathering, with some 600 companies as members of the OpenDocument Foundation and with governments around the world beginning to opt for (and sometimes even mandate) ODF, it is not ODF that will need to deal with Microsoft, but rather it is Microsoft that will need to deal properly with ODF.
OpenOffice now has a significant market share, perhaps between 10% and 20% of the market (and growing), with MS Office for all practical purposes having about 70%. Other Office suites of any note perhaps have only approximately 1% each of the remaining 10%-15%.
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-ope…
MS Office is only available really for one desktop platform, and partially for another. Both platforms are x86 only. OpenOffice is available on virtaully any platform or device.
So right now, today, there are effectively two main Office suites. Only one of them can currently deal adequately with the other’s format. OpenOffice can also deal properly with all the other minor players formats.
You do the math.
Edited 2010-02-17 01:08 UTC
I agree, for the mistakes I found in OpenOffice’s reading Microsoft Word ODT’s are OpenOffice’s fault, not Microsoft’s. For example here is one that has not yet been fixed:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533318
Basically, OpenOffice cheated.
As for OOXML versus ODF, having looked at both the specs, ODF is a much better spec since it is more self consistent, and easier to read.
I am curious to see what happens when ODF 1.2 comes out and finally specifies a spreadsheet formulas.
The errors in Microsoft’s output when writing ODF files are far, far more fundamental than that. And yes, they are Microsft’s errors, unique to Microsoft of all implementations of production of ODF documents. Thisngs as fundamental as cell references in spreadsheets not having required surrounding square braces (e.g. A7 instead of [A7]).
Only Microsoft, of all ODF producers, make these errors.
One would suspect that this is deliberate by Microsoft, in order to create deliberately non-interoperable “supposed-to-be ODF” documents … so that Microsoft could then claim that ODF was not interoperable. In other words, sabotage.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-od…
http://homembit.com/2009/05/microsoft-now-attempt-to-fragment-odf.h…
I agree with you that Microsoft did a poor job on their spreadsheet implementation (to the point of being deliberate bad). On the other hand about the only thing ODF specifies is how to do cell references in ODF version 1.1 and before. I am curious if Microsoft will fix their spreadsheet ODF implementation when version 1.2 is finished which does specify spreadsheet formulas.
As for word processor documents, I have had much better luck with Microsoft Word 2007’s reading ODF files with equations from OpenOffice than I ever had with OpenOffice’s Word Document saving. And every single bug I found going the other way was OpenOffice 3.1’s fault so far as I could tell. I think most of them are fixed in 3.2, with the possible exception of the one I mentioned before, but I have not tried yet.
sorry to burst your bubble again, but microsofts code is correct
ms is encoding it as table:formula=”msoxl:=A1+A2+A3″ and not as table:formula=”=A1+A2+A3″
completely valid and showing how f–ked up odf is in it’s current state…
Please desist with your unwarranted FUD.
Microsoft’s coding is not at all correct according to the standard and according to the body that sets the standard. It is entirely wrong.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
No other implementation of ODF has anywhere near the level of non-compliance that Microsoft’s implementation does. Microsoft’s implementation of ODF is borked, not the standard itself.
These are the valid criticisms of ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Criticism
These criticisms are addressed in ODF 1.2. The criticisms do not include any valid excuse for Microsoft getting ODF so utterly wrong.
Over 600 companies support OpenDocument via the OpenDocument Format Alliance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_Format_Alliance
Only Microsoft effectively stands in opposition.
Worldwide official support for OpenDocument is growing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption
You can test for yourself how correct, or otherwise, any given ODF file actually is:
http://opendocumentfellowship.com/validator
ODF files produced by Microsoft Office software are borked … correction: Microsoft claims these are ODF files, but according to the standard itself, and according to the ODF validators, they aren’t really ODF files at all.
Edited 2010-02-16 02:20 UTC
you can post as much links as you like, but maybe you should take a look at the official standart
download the pdf for odf 1.0 and scroll to page 184
there you will find:
and now take a guess what “msoxl:” is and how “=A1+A2+A3” is encoded
So you are trying to say, in effect, that Microsoft are clever to have found an oblique way to interpret the text and to get it wrong according to everyone else’s interpretation? Clap, clap, my my, how very clever of them. I think both you and they have, once again, entirely missed the very idea of a “standard”. The idea is to be interoperable, the idea is not to find “clever” ways to stuff it up.
Rant all you like: put it through the ODF validator, and it will quickly show you that msoxl is not a valid ODF namespace. Microsoft do not get to say what is, and what is not valid ODF … the OASIS Technical Committee does. (PS: Microsoft were offered a seat on the OASIS Technical Committee for ODF from the outset, but they declined to participate).
What would it kill Microsoft to actually include the required square brackets ( as in =”msoxl:=[A1]+[A2]+[A3]” ) for the cell references?
Edited 2010-02-16 03:26 UTC
More one this topic here:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet-inter…
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10235450-92.html
Note how Microsoft is being silly:
“Microsoft’s response to the issue has been to say that the problem lies in the ODF 1.1 standard, which does not include formula syntax.”
That is easy then … just use the same syntax as every other ODF producer has used, and which is the basis of OpenFormula in ODF 1.2. That way, we have a standard, and that way, we are interoperable.
OpenFormula has been ready since mid 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
But no, Microsoft has to be “clever”, and do something totally not interoperable with everyone else before and after them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula#Microsoft_response
As Rob Weir says:
Then Microsoft have the chutzpah to say this:
He said ODF 1.2, when ready, is likely to address this issue through a new Open Formula syntax. Mahugh noted that Microsoft chose not to support this version because it has not been passed as a standard by OASIS, yet.
“But we’re not there yet; ODF 1.2 is not done, and not even ready for public review,” he said.
What he omits to mention is that everyone else (other than Microsoft) has implemented the same OpenFormula syntax (as is formally defined in ODF 1.2) for ages.
Microsoft are clearly just seeking excuses for their deliberate sabotage attempts.
Happily, all that this is likely to mean is that Office is seen as the one incompatible and (deliberately) not-interoperable Office product, and that to avoid interoperability problems the best bet is simply to use ANYTHING else.
It turns out, strangely enough, that this is just as true for web browsers as it is for Office suites.
Edited 2010-02-16 04:03 UTC
the iso ooxml standard isn’t used by anyone at the moment because microsoft isn’t using it and there’s a big chance that they’ll never use it.
Edited 2010-02-17 20:11 UTC
Two things to note:
1) Openoffice 3.2 flies. It^A's performance is absolutely great on this small atom 1.6ghz netbook.
2) Here^A's one of the best guides I have read on getting the most out of Openoffice^A's writer app:
http://linuxbeacon.com/doku.php/articles:writertips
A quick observation on what is achievable now:
On my current system, using Arch Linux and KDE SC 4.4, I get the following result when launching OpenOffice Writer 3.2 from the desktop panel shortcut:
2 seconds flat. Writer loads, and is ready to use, just two seconds after clicking the icon.
This is considerably faster than previous versions on this same machine.
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+
Radeon HD 4350 graphic card
OpenGL 1.5 Mesa 7.7
3GB RAM.
In oreder to obtain this result, I note that I am also running the preload daemon, which is the Linux equivalent of Superfetch of Windows 7 and Vista.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfetch#SuperFetch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preload_%28software%29
I never use OO. It’s now on my machine just to open excel spreadsheets, word docs, and the occasional powerpoint presentation that are sent my way. The few documents I need to create end up being done with LaTeX.
The latest status of ODF 1.2 is here:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/01/odf-1-2-part-1-public-review.ht…
Public review stage. Despite interference, delay and nay-saying from Microsoft, as evidenced here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/02/19/building-consensus…
For those using MS Office 2000/XP/2003/2007 (including Service Pack 2), in order to be correctly interoperable with other ODF-compliant suites (and in particular, inter-operable with OpenOffice 3.2) one should install a compatible ODF plugin such as this one:
http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/137/2/Windows/21981
This plugin now “Allows Microsoft Users to Make ODF their Default File Format”.
From the description “Sun ODF Plug-in 3.1 offers support for MS Office 2000/XP/2003/2007 (including Service Pack 2) and support for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The Sun product is compatible with ODF 1.2 as well as older 1.x versions.”
Do NOT use the so-claimed ODF support in MS Office 2007 SP2, as that will produce totally invalid ODF output.
PS: Microsoft explicitly states that they DO NOT implement ODF 1.2. Nor do they achieve even partial interoperability with ODF 1.1 or 1.0.
Edited 2010-02-16 10:08 UTC
Sadly, Open Office still breaks MS .doc and .docx and does a rather lousy job at exporting anything but trivial documents. Things like this makes OO rather unusable for me and for many others who exchange documents in MS formats.
Maybe in 10 years we will see better compatibility with MS Office.
2130 will be the year of linux desktop and 2150 will be the year of Open Office.
However, MS Office is far worse in that it natively deliberately corrupts and mis-handles OpenOffice documents. At least with OpenOffice there is some chance at interoperability.
Microsoft’s monopoly in the Office suite market is slowly dissipating. There are now two main Office suites in common use, and only one of them (OpenOffice) makes even a half-way decent attempt at handling the formats of the other.
Happily, there is a reasonable solution even if you do use MS Office. The solution is to download the Sun Plugin for MS Office, and exchange your documents in ODF format using this plugin.
http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/137/2/Windows/21981
The plugin will even let you set ODF as the default format for your Office files.
Voila!
The tipping point may well be much closer than you imagine. OpenOffice already has sufficient market share that Microsoft cannot simply ignore it any longer, and the utter inability of MS Office to properly handle ODF format is becoming a major deficiency of MS Office. This is why Microsoft have now taken up a seat on the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee.
Edited 2010-02-17 22:38 UTC