[odf-discuss] Becta's response to the approval of Office Open XML

[marbux]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 9:20 PM, Alexandro Colorado <jza at openoffice.org>
wrote:

> Did i miss something here, how limited is the ODF plugin for Microsoft
> Office?


So far as I know, the first published empirical comparison of conversion
fidelity is  here. <
http://www.odfworkshop.nl/files/20080228-ODFworkshop-WernerLanger.pdf>. It's
a preliminary report in a slide presentation; the full report won't be out
until later.

But the "Microsoft" (Clever Age) and Novell  OOo converters were broken by
design. Steve Ballmer said when Microsoft support for the project was first
announced:

Nor will the collaboration team attempt to build file converters that can
make files 100 percent compatible between the two file formats, he said. But
it will achieve the level of interoperability that customers can work with,
he said.

<
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Ballmer-Invites-Patent-Talks-with-Competing-Linux-Vendors/
>.


> And more importantly what does OOXML has to do with this?
>

The Microsoft/Clever Age plug-ins do not provide native ODF support in MS
Office, using the Office native file format support APIs. They use external
processes, XSLTs with pre- and post-processing, to convert between OOXML and
ODF.

So, e.g., the Clever Age plug-ins for Office provide no means to set ODF as
the default file save format.

The Novell plug-ins for OOXML support in OOo recycle the Clever Age code
base.

The Sun ODF plug-ins for Office do somewhat better and make partial use of
the Office native file support APIs. But the conversion fidelity they
provide is still far from acceptable for use in fully automated business
processes where there is no opportunity for manual inspection of the
converted output for artefacts.

Best regards,

Paul
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