OOXML vs ODF: where next for interoperability?

ODF seems like such a neat thing.

Of course, anything you don't understand seems like magic.

Sounds like ODF isn't quite what I thought it was: a lingua franca for office applications. Bummer. Also a bummer for me, as I have entered many a discussion with that misconception.

If ODF must control the feature sets available, then it really is tied to a specific application -- even if other applications are willing to bind themselves to the parent application's feature set.

It is not reasonable to ask that Microsoft, or, more to the point, Microsoft Office users, alter their feature set to match the ODF reference application (which,hmmm, is OpenOffice).

Quoting:Sounds like ODF isn't quite what I thought it was: a lingua franca for office applications.

You do realize where that sound is coming from right? The OpenDocument Foundation a.k.a. the "OpenDocument is really cool, as long as you use our proprietary and expensive converter for it" foundation.

I am using ODF myself as a basis for fully automated office work, from report generation to billing and more, and I can tell you, ODF works just fine as the "lingua franca for office applications".

>You do realize where that sound is coming from right?

Sound an awful lot like "These guys have cooties" and not a lot like "This is wrong, and here's why."

> It is not reasonable to ask that Microsoft, or, more to the point, Microsoft Office users, alter their feature set to match the ODF reference application...

So, the real questions are: What percentage of the Microsoft Office feature set is implemented by ODF? And of the percentage that isn't, how much of it is actually used in the real world by a significant percentage of people?

There will always be application features that can't be easily implemented. The question becomes how numerous and how important they are.

If ODF implements 90% of the Microsoft Office feature set, and the remaining 10% is only used by 5% of Office users, then I'd say it's a success.

If on the other hand, 90% of Office users use that 10%, or ODF only implements 75% of the feature set, it's not going to work.

>If ODF implements 90% of the Microsoft Office feature set, and the remaining 10% is only used by 5% of Office users, then I'd say it's a success.

Maybe, but it's not as simple as that.

Picture a corporate user.

Perhaps 5% if their users -- say, financial types and maybe some managers with significant budgets -- use 2 or 3 % of features in Excel that most don't use. Maybe 5% if their users -- Sales people this time, use a few unsupported PowerPoint features that most don't use. Maybe another few percent -- technical writers? legal secretaries? who knows -- use another couple of percent of templating/who knows what.

All told, you might have 5-10% of features, none of which is used by more than a small percentage of the company's users, but 15-20% of the company's users have something they use that isn't there. Big companies like to standardize, so OpenOffice is not an option.

I'll bet scenarios like that are more common than you think.

> I'll bet scenarios like that are more common than you think.

You underestimate my understanding of the issue, Dino. :)

The percentages I used above were intended to be the total number, i.e., my 5% was intended to be the same as 15-20% you used. I realize that's not obvious, and apologize for the lack of clarity.

I think if ODF/OpenOffice can meet the needs of 80% of current Office users then we can say it's a success. However, the goal should be higher than that. The goal should be meeting the needs of 90-95% of Office users. Anything above 95% or so is probably reaching the point of diminishing returns for the effort required.

Windows 3.1 was deemed acceptable for business use. Word perfect 2.0 was deemed acceptable for business use.

The bar for acceptability in the business arena is actually pretty low.

dino just has higher standards.

>Windows 3.1 was deemed acceptable for business use. > Word perfect 2.0 was deemed acceptable for business use.

So how many businesses use them now?

That which was good enough fifteen years ago is inadequate today.

I can't imagine that the ODF standard is "locked down." I hope that there will be opportunities to add functionality as it is needed while maintaining full backward compatibility for older documents.

And if Microsoft wants to be a partner in working on the standard and wants to include certain features, they have as much of a right as any other developer to do so. But it doesn't have to be their standard.

Isn't "proprietary extensions" the magic word? [ok, two words] In order to prevent Microsoft from incompatibly extending ODF "in order to support billions of existing Office documents", the format has to be "locked down" a bit... And extended in a controlled way.

The bottom line is that Redmond is still the dung in the punchbowl.

I'm hoping that the porting of KDE and KOffice to Mac OS X and Windows will give ODF a boost. We'll see how well the next version of KOffice runs. A little competition in the free-office-suite space couldn't hurt.

Here's how I see it.

ODF does everything it needs to do.

The "missing" features are akin to the OOXML "do_tabs_like_Word_2" feature. Yes, it's missing, there is no such feature. Nor will there ever be.

So rather than wonder what might someone want that is not included already, I would ask what someone needs it to do that it can't already do?

It's impossible to take everything in MS-Office and implement it in ODF, simply because Microsoft controls everything in MS-Office. There are going to be features that MS built in that will not be included in ODF if for no other reason than they are stupid, redundant, or so badly implemented that no one but Microsoft would bother.