[odf-discuss] ODF vs OXML

[Damon Anderson]

At my company we have been making every effort to get out of MS and into  
ODF (which in our case has meant OOo). We have good success replacing MS  
Word, though several of the most basic and common functions we are used to  
using can be extremely complex and time consuming in OOo (due to extremely  
complex or un-intuitive keyboard shortcuts or OOo extreme over dependency  
on opening the entire properties window for a group of characters,  
paragraph, etc.).

Draw is even getting fairly heavy use as we have discovered that we can  
use page or screen captures with links in a Draw document and out put it  
to a PDF and create "3D" documentation where the Draw PDF becomes the  
"Site Map" to the related specification documents. Again there are obvious  
flaws in Draw... (templates are terrible but we would really like to  
replace Visio with draw, SVG support is spotty, and why can't I  
import/embed an ODG file in my ODT file?).

But the real failing, and here is where Microsoft has a major opportonity  
to promote their OXML standard, is in Calc. Calc works fine for the  
absolute basic spreadsheet. But functions like the Data Auto-Filter, which  
make Excel so powerful, are basically non-functioning in OOo. If ODF  
really wants to beat out Microsoft a real concerted effort needs to be  
made to get the Calculations and spreadsheet functionality fully defined  
in the ODF standard.

Damon Anderson, Business Director
Corigo Vietnam