status of Microsoft Office compliance with ODF support?

users
#1

Greetings,

here is the question, you're welcome to pass it around as much as you
see fit:

what is the ACTUAL, current status of Microsoft Office compliance with
support for the OpenDocument Format? Is there something specific that
isn't supported yet? What, how.. Case stories, tests, reports,
whatever, all pointers are welcome. Thanks in advance!

    Marco

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
If this is for an article then i am not sure we can really help.
Mostly we are all just volunteers and can't give the TDF's official
stand-point on any of this. All we can give is anecdotes which
doesn't really count as proof!

Over the years we have often heard about problems with the MS format
on this mailing list but very seldom heard about problems with our
format on their systems!

Quite why the problems weren't being raised as bug-reports against
MS's apparently poor implementation is a bit of a mystery. MS admit
to making "accidental" mistakes in their implementation of their own
format and we get the blame. It was the same with the Rtf format and
even now that MS have lost the court case about their 'accidents' with
Rtf people still seem to think that everyone else was to blame. It
might be interesting to compare the similarity of the promises for
interoperability made by MS for both formats over the years and the
types of 'accidents' that both formats have suffered.

We know for certain that Excel 2010 and previous versions of MSO
implemented ODF support so badly that formulas got replaced by
hard-coded values. However, over the years this only got reported to
us 1 or 2 times.

What we don't know is whether people experienced the problem and took
it as a sign to avoid Open Document Formats in favour of proprietary
implementations of other formats or whether people were simply not
using ODF much at all and so never noticed the problem.

Perhaps people expected formats to only work on the systems they were
written in, ie that the much vaunted "interoperability" was a complete
myth and only applied to machines running the same OS and the same
version of the same programs. That certainly seems to be the
prevelant attitude amongst office workers i work with.

Anyway, i personally think MS Office is only just attempting to
correctly implement the format because ODF is only just beginning to
be used widely enough that people are beginning to question why it
works so well on everything except MS's stuff.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#3

You mean it works so well on the 1% of systems that don't use MS Office?

#4

See https://www.mail-archive.com/users@global.libreoffice.org/msg26889.html.
There is a similar comparison web page for text documents. Search this
mailing list or ask m$,

#5

Jay Lozier wrote

MSO 2010 and earlier did not support ODF 1.2 only ODF 1.1. I saw
somewhere that ODF 1.2 is supported in MSO 2013/Office 365.

The official statement was made on the MS Office blog in August 2012:

http://blogs.office.com/2012/08/13/new-file-format-options-in-the-new-office/

The "New Office" referred to is MS Office 2013. ODF v1.1 can be opened,
edited, and saved under MS Office 2007 + Service Pack 2 and MS Office 2010.
This format can also be opened and edited under MS Office 2013. ODF v1.2 can
only be opened, edited, and saved under MS Office 2013. The current ODF v1.2
Extended (to be ODF v1.3) is not supported.

I am unaware to what degree subsequent corrections to the ODF specification
(v1.1 and v1.2) by OASIS have been implemented by Microsoft.

Best wishes, Owen.