[odf-discuss] Sun's OpenDocument filter for MS office released

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On 7/5/07, Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at zmsl.com> wrote:
> It looks like Sun has made an initial release of their plugin for MS
> Office to read ODF files. It only supports text documents so far, no
> spreadsheets or presentations:
>
> Does anyone know if this plugin requires a server-side copy of
> OpenOffice? Or does it work stand-alone? I don't have a copy of MS
> Office to test on.

It works stand-alone on a MS Windows + MS Office 2000, XP or 2003 install.
It expands to a 40 MBytes plug-in (the code itself is smaller due to
compression). Installation is easy, does not depend on other software.
For now, upgrades do require a full download of the new version. Automatic
installs with ADS are tested. Automatic installs with SMS should work as well.

I executed a large number of tests on this plugin (actually slightly
newer versions from "head") and the results are very good now. On
the "Eurolook" test suite of approx. 50 .odt documents, almost all
documents convert flawlessly (at least to a level where they are
perfectly usable).

I also have access to the Powerpoint plug-in, which also works very
good in initial tests (e.g. a 140 page, complex .odp presentation with
all kinds of graphics and animations runs flawlessly from Excell 2003
with the Sun plug-in). Are you really sure that the public plug-in does
not support PowerPoint ? (I am at home on holiday now and have no
access to Microsoft Office at home ...)

As a reference, I consider rendering of .odt and .odp files in
MS Office 2003 + Sun plug-in now to be significantly superior to what I
have used and whitnessed for many years in rendering .doc and .ppt
files from OO.o (which was the "other diagonal" ... using OO.o with
.doc/.ppt/.xls as "de facto" (but non-open) standard). I believe this
actually starts to fullfil the promise of ODF: being able to edit and render
office documents with good interoperability between a large number of
Office applications (MS Office, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Notes, and
emerging apps like Google Docs etc.).

We will soon be in a situation where it will be "safe" to send an ODF
document and know the other side will always be able to use it
(with MS Office + plug-in, with OO.o, with Notes, with Google Docs, etc.).
This will replace the old practice of sending .doc since that was the
document format "that everyone could always read".

Currently the quality of the Sun plug-in is clearly superior to the
odf-convertor (although there is one case of nested tables where the
Sun plug-in still has known bugs and I had to use the Clever Age
convertor). But also for the Clever Age convertor, Microsoft now
pledged money to create a 1.1 version of the Word AddIn and at the
demand of a large Belgian Administrations customer, will also support
Office 2000 (until now only Office XP, 2003 and 2007 where supported).
Microsoft plans to release the Word 1.1 AddIn and the 1.0 PowerPoint
and Spreadsheet plug-in by 30 Aug 2007 (the day before the Belgian
deadline on ODF read functionality ...).

I think it remains important to indicate to all vendors that interop with
ODF is important. The more customers will give this message to the
vendors, the more effort (and budget) they will invest in supporting ODF.
It is important to create enough ciritical mass so that all vendors consider
it as a requirement to also support ODF.

One specific recommendation that has been suggested is to demand full,
official ODF support from Microsoft, before migrations to MS Office 2007
are executed. This seems like a reasonable request that is resounding
with customers and that acts as a clear signal to Microsoft.

Peter

-- 
Peter Vandenabeele
peter AT vandenabeele DOT com
http://www.vandenabeele.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/petervandenabeele/
http://www.taximize.be/
http://del.icio.us/petervandenabeele