[odf-discuss] Impressions using the MS Office ODF plugin convertor for "real work"

[Alex Hudson]

So,

This evening I had the pleasure of trying Office 2003's support for
OpenDocument, using the open source plugin, and thought I would share my
experience.

The document I was converting is one generated from various sources and
compiled into OpenDocument, and is essentially the master document -
OpenOffice.org is then used to create the Table of Contents, etc. It's a
document with an image in the header, and the rest is text - around 220
pages of text, with varying lists numbered and bulleted, somewhat complex.

Impression of the UI: it's different to the mock-ups; not in the main
Open/Save dialog, but 'Open OpenDocument' appears just under 'Open'. I
thought it was fine.

However... speed is an issue. The technical way it works is that it's a
.net 2.0 program which converts the OpenDocument into OpenXML, and the
OpenXML is then converted by the "official" Microsoft plugin for Office
2003 (I assume this is why the option is difficult to integrate into the
main open/save). So, you're doing two conversions before the document is
actually 'loading', and neither conversion is terribly quick. Opening my
document took ~20 seconds, which is too much. If all my documents were
this long, I don't think using ODF as your primary format would be a
pleasant experience in this software.

I didn't try with a shorter document, but in my experience these types
of conversions tend to be linear in time until you hit RAM/disk
shortages, so I would still expect the opening/closing of ODF to have a
noticeable "bump" compared to the more native formats. OpenXML has a
slightly smaller "bump", but there's still one there.

I imagine this is all quicker in Office 2007.

-- 
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