[odf-discuss] Microsoft and Novell cooperate on document formats

[Alex Hudson]

marbux wrote:
> On 11/2/06, *Alex Hudson* <alex at stratagia.co.uk
> <mailto:alex at stratagia.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     I don't know about OLE, but Novell's OpenOffice.org already
>     includes VBA
>     scripting.
>
>
> VBA or a clean room reverse engineered clone? I would really be
> surprised if it is VBA, given that it's GPL.

If it works, I don't think it matters which. The point is that VBA
compatibility is becoming less of an issue, and is an area in which
Novell have gone beyond the specs. as they already exist.

> As I said in an earlier post, I suspect that you too have missed just
> how big a job it would be to fully implement MOOX in OOo. Someone (Rob
> Weir?) recently estimated that it would take over 10 years to fully
> implement MOOX in an app other than MS Office, if ever.

Yeah, but to be fair, that's actually disingenuous.

It you were writing an app from scratch, maybe it would take ten years.
OXML is a less complex format to support than the Office binary formats,
though, and people (eg. Abisource, Gnumeric) have written excellent
libraries to read those formats, and developed applications which use
them, in something less than 10 years.

You can always argue about what "full support" actually means, but
realistically, it will take Novell maybe a year to implement something
which fulfils that vast majority of users' needs.

(Not a year from now, obviously - they've already started to add support).

-- 
Alex Hudson
IT Director, Stratagia Ltd.
P: 0845 226 17 13     W: http://www.stratagia.co.uk/
F: 0845 226 17 14     E: alex (at) stratagia.co.uk