Denmark Chooses OpenDocument Format 198
Seahawk was one of several readers to write in with news of Denmark's decision to embrace ODF. "On Friday morning Denmark decided to choose ODF over Microsoft's OOXML. For now the decision is only effective for governmental institutions, but regions and municipalities will most likely follow some time in the future. The decision has unfolded over a period of four years, and many open source advocates were fearing the worst, but it looks like the minister finally caved in and listened to what a lot of people were saying." While in transition away from Microsoft Office formats, the Danes may find use for this new OpenOffice integration guide (sent in by reader AdeleWard).
ODF format or not (Score:3, Funny)
Queue the Complimentary Office 2k7 Licenses in.. (Score:2)
Re:Queue the Complimentary Office 2k7 Licenses in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, free Office licenses would be good being that it supports ODF, its a win win situation for them.
They use an open standard and aren't stuck with any one vendor, and one of those vendors may give them software for free.
The only retraining needed will be to get people to save in ODF rather than DOCX.
Re:Queue the Complimentary Office 2k7 Licenses in. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Queue the Complimentary Office 2k7 Licenses in. (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as they want the government to use their software, which in turn keeps people used to using MS Office and using it elsewhere.
They start making it incompatible with the standard and they'll run into problems.
Now ... if the standard allows for extensibility, and they take advantage of that extensibility to provide extra features that governments want to use than whos fault is that?
The point of an OPEN document format is to allow people to use whatever software they want, not tie them in to some particular OSS software package.
If that is your (or anyone elses goal), to get people to not use MS Office and to force them to use OSS like OpenOffice, well then thats no better than being locked into MSOffice really.
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Microsoft will then just have to compete by having the best products and quite frankly they have won. Especially with excel, their features and usability are far ahead of anything else. I love being able to open excel sheets in OpenOffice on my laptop (linux..so no Excel) without any weird formatting errors, but when creating complicated shit I far prefer the MS product. If only they could do as well with their other prod
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And what happened with that?
People stopped using it in favor of the one that actually followed the standard, and the MS flavor went away.
Re:Queue the Complimentary Office 2k7 Licenses in. (Score:5, Informative)
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No, Sun sued them and MS were forced to stop developing their non standard version... Theirs went away because MS stopped pushing it, not because users chose the standard version instead.
Sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why hopefully? Do you even understand the point of ODF? It's *NOT* OpenOffice.
why is parent +5 insightful? (Score:2)
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Come now! Don't LOOSE your cool and go all rouge on us!
Re:It's CUE (Score:2, Interesting)
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As an American, I need to set you straight on a few things. First, it's queue the music, as in a queue ball in pool or as you call it, green ball bounce edges pocket shooting or simply snooker.
Now we cue up in a line, or simply a Q, named after the irrepressible Star Trek character who was of course partly British in spirit. And marking edges of tape is most effectively done with India ink, which has a bit of a misnomer as it is actually produced by Native Americans.
Finally, the word Walla is French, of c
another step in the right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
is there any reasonable person who will tell me (Score:2)
why the parent is modded as 'flamebait', in a reasonable manner ?
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Maybe because he let a little nerd-rage get the best of him. It's easy to do when responding to a post full of tripe and drivel like the GP. He could have probably could have gotten the point across without the vitriol and got modded up. Either that or someone with mod points this week hates him in which case he's screwed.
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I see no reason they'd switch from MS products if they work properly. Having used both MS Office and OpenOffice, I'd rather pay for MS Office than use OpenOffice, I'm pretty sure most desk jockeys would feel the same way.
Desk jockey, here. And just to be clear... have you ever used Office 2007? That's what made me switch to OOo.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in any case, I'm sure if everyone realized they could get a free MS-compatible software suite, fewer would spend the money. The wallet is a powerful motivator.
And just wait until Microsoft extends the open standard in proprietary ways... remember IE6? This is why people want to motivate others to move away from Microsoft's software.
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Who said anything about moving away from MS software? MS Office supports ODF.
MS Office supports only ODF version 1.0 (the up to date version of ODF is 2.0). Also, it has many features which aren't going to convert into ODF 1.0 correctly so it's not really suitable. What's the point of using MS Office as an ODF editor when you can get Open Office for free? Even if you do have MS Office, you'll be better off having OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] installed on your computer as well.
Re:another step in the right direction (Score:4, Informative)
The current complete and published OpenDocument format is ODF 1.1. ODF 1.2 is in draft form according to the latest announcements from OASIS. Just because OpenOffice.org is putting out software based on the draft, doesn't mean it's final yet.
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>(the up to date version of ODF is 2.0).
No, 1.1 is the current version, 1.2 is being worked on and it looks like it ought to be finished this year:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/201001/threads.html [oasis-open.org]
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An open standard is the first step, and MS knows this which is why they fight against it so hard...
OO may lag behind today, but for a large number of users it would already be more than adequate to their needs. For many of these users, compatibility with other people using MS is what stops them using OO. An open standard levels the playing field and removes incompatibility as a problem.
With an open standard, you would see casual users moving to OO or other free alternatives, as well as other pay suites like
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hence the "first step"...
Once you have open standards, then MS get pushed into the relatively small niche of people who need the extra features of excel and powerpoint and are willing to pay a premium for them... The rest of the "sally secretary", home user and casual user types get OO because it saves a lot of money.
The only reason this isn't happening already is because of proprietary format lock-in.
I've worked at a lot of companies of various sizes, and most of them spend ridiculous sums of money to hav
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ODF spreading like wildfire (Score:5, Informative)
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The US?
Ba-da-bing! Thank you all, try the waitress.
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Maybe it's more like slowfire.
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In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark
Belgium: 10.4 mio people
Netherlands: 16.5 mio people
Norway: 4.9 mio people
Denmark: 5.5 mio people
Europe: 731 mio people
So 37.1/731 mio = 5.1%. And I can't speak for the other countries, but the only requirement in Norway was that public information must be at least in either HTML, PDF or ODF - having DOCs is fine as long as it's not the only option and they can still use whatever tools they like internally. I have been working with one rather large government institution in Norway and there's thousands and
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Also, OO can read most office stuff (except for latest greatest (depending on your distro of choise)) while office doesn't do OO - which means those 17% sets the communication standard for the rest of EU; want to talk to us in Denmark (or other EU countries where they have gone OO) - install OO...
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The Oracle-Sun merger was only opposed by Mr. Codeplex Monty Widenius... silly.
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learning to write (Score:2)
So regions and municipalities are in fact not government institutions in Denmark? My guess is that you meant that the decision is currently only effective for national government institutions, but I'm not sure.
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Yep, that's correct (Dane here)
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Reading comprehension is hard.
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Are they anywhere? I thought many people was just misusing of the word "government" when they meant "public".
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Are they anywhere? I thought many people was just misusing of the word "government" when they meant "public".
Of course they are. Provincial, state, & city governments are all, uhm, governments.
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What on earth is a city government? Do you mean the city council or the majors office?
Anyway, the mistake is much more basic than that, most institutions are never government(al). They are public, governments change, but the institutions don't, only those tied directly to the faith of the existing government can be called government institutions.
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Oh good grief, learn to use a dictionary before arguing about the meaning of words:
government |gvr(n)mnt|
noun
1 [treated as sing. or pl. ] the governing body of a nation, state, or community.
- the system by which a nation, state, or community is governed
- the action or manner of controlling or regulating a nation, organization, or people
- the group of persons in office at a particular time; administration
...
Cost savings? (Score:2)
It can be used in offices where other file formats are used and represents a great cost saving for organisations
What costs are saved by adopting this file format?
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government offices will not be forced to upgrade to maintain compatibility. they will be able to apply cost-effectiveness decisions to their software purchases based on the benefit and value of future software versions.
Re:Cost savings? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, not *having* to spend money in commercial software licenses?
It's the same old argument ... why insist on having citizens pay for software so they can read official documents?
* If you force a free format, you can use any software you like -- including the same commercial software you've been using for years.
* But, if you force a commercial format, there is NO guarantee (almost like the opposite) that you can use any software you like -- even non-commercial.
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I would agree with you, in that HMTL is very good as an information markup language.
However, HTML was never intended to play well with fixed media (in fact, one might argue the opposite), so page margins and numbering, footnotes, etc. would be a mess.
Also consider that ODF is not just for text documents, it also covers spread sheets, presentations, and (most tricky for HTML) drawings.
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Well, that's why CSS2 has specific support for paged media [westciv.com], using the @page rule.
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Neat! Thanks for the info.
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What costs are saved by adopting this file format?
I think it's a fallacious argument from the start, anyway. Even if costs actually increase, ultimately, the openness of the file formats that government uses (at least in those cases where the documents can potentially be made available to the public, or where it's accepted formats of documents submitted to the government) is more important. Reason being, one can opt out from dealing with a private business that uses the "wrong format" for which you don't have means to work with it - but one cannot opt out
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Judging by the low quality of documents that office monkeys email to each other, even more time and money could be saved by standardising on ascii txt files.
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Thank you for that insightful analysis, Mr. Gates.
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Of course, for most companies, given the choice between free OO and paying for MS Office, they'll still choose MS Office for a number of reasons.
That really depends on the business. Most of the people at my company fill revenue-producing positions that have nothing to do with word processing or spreadsheet editing. The choice for us was between everyone in the company getting OpenOffice on their PC, or only 3-4 people in the company getting Microsoft Office. That's how we ended up with OOo on all desktops.
Competition (Score:2)
Probably the biggest cost saving, presuming you stick with MS Office, is that MS will make Office cheaper to encourage you not to use OOo.
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Your points are more valid for large corporations than small businesses.
And this is what I've observed. Multiple small companies going to free/opensource stacks (including Thunderbird/Gmail and OOo.) They'll eventually grow into bigger businesses that do not use Word.
At large businesses, they do not pay full retail (in fact, having a credible OOo trial seems to be an excellent way to get Microsoft to cut prices by half) and if they are already committed to Microsoft, then they are trapped because Microsof
More SHILLERY (Score:3, Informative)
By any objective standards all M$ software is crap by design, M$Word typeset algorithm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [wikipedia.org]
Prominent office suites supporting OpenDocument fully or partially include:
* AbiWord [16][17] (Users of Windows installations must first download and install Import/Export Plugins)
* Adobe Buzzword[18]
* Atlantis Word Processor[19]
* Google Docs [20]
* IBM Lotus Symphony [21][22]
* KOffice [23]
Untrue story - Denmark did not pick ODF (Score:3, Informative)
This slashdot story has the same headline as many Danish stories, but the decision did not exclude OOXML, and did not specifically pick ODF. However, the criterias that were decided upon, currently only fits ODF in the minds of most people, but Jasper Bojsen fra Microsoft also thinks that Microsoft OOXML complies with the criterias.
So basically, ODF is in, OOXML may be in, too.
Re:Untrue story - Denmark did not pick ODF (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that there is quite a bit of "noise" still ... we shall see what the dry ink says on Tuesday.
Having said that in the part of the agreement concerning editable documents, it says that:
4. Starting 1st of April 2011, govermental institutions will be required to send and receive documents in formats covered by the list mentioned in section 2 including ODF. To ensure that everyone, regardless of platform, have access to editable documents published on the websites of state authorities, the documents must be in ODF and other document formats that are listed.
So unless they rephrase this agreement, what it says here is that if you're an official, you must publish in ODF and optionally in additional formats in accordance to "The List".
As for "The List" itself:
The following principles must be fulfilled before a standard can be included on the list. The standard must be:
* Fully documented and publicly available;
* Freely implementable without economical, political or legal limitations on implementation and use;
* Approved by an internationally recognized standards organisation such as ISO, and standardized and maintained in an open forum through an open process;
* It must be demonstrable that the standard can be directly implemented by anyone in its entirety on multiple platforms;
* Interoperable within the functionality parameters with the other standards on the list
Take special note of the last point — what is interesting is that initially, ODF is the only standard on the list, so what this means is that OOXML cannot make the cut unless it "plays well" with ODF.
There is an additional provision that documents that are not intended for editing must be published in PDF/A-1 format.
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Well, that's a perfect case for OOo, then, in the sense that it already includes the ability to export seamlessly to PDF/A-1.
It's not an edge over MS Office, though, as the latter can also export to PDF/A out of the box with the most recent service pack.
Danish government doesn't comply with own decision (Score:2)
Currently, the situation is, that ODF and OOXML must both be accepted, but there are several examples where only Microsoft dataformats are received. Therefore, it can not be expected, that this new decision will have full effect quickly.
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The effect of this decision is that every official in the national government will have to publish official documents in ODF. I don't think this decision has any directives about the formats that the government officials can receive.
The obvious ripple effect of this decision is that everyone who consumes official documents will require software that can render an ODF document (and there are lots, so this will be easy). Since most software that can render ODF documents can also create ODF documents, it seems
How/where was Denmark on the ISO debacle? (Score:2)
When OOXML was being crammed through ISO through ballot stuffing, what was Denmark's position? Were they involved at all? If they were involved, did they vote yes or no?
No time to search that right now, but it would be an interesting question to know the answer to.
Re:How/where was Denmark on the ISO debacle? (Score:5, Informative)
Denmark voted "Yes with comments" on the ISO OOXML ballot. Of course that turned out to do a hell of a lot of good since at later meetings a lot of ISO's changes to the ECMA spec were tossed away, so essentially we just voted "Yes".
A lot of the members of Dansk Standard [www.ds.dk] wanted to vote "No", but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Denmark would say yes given that business in this country is nearly 100% MS-based. (Actually... Denmark might be the country in the West with the highest percentage of Windows installs).
And on a personal note, I don't take ISO seriously any more, and neither should you.
Go Denmark! (Score:2)
ODF is already on a roll throughout the European governments. It is the standard in Belgium, Croatia, the Netherlands, and has a strong foothold in Finland, France, Germany, the UK, Norway and Slovakia.
The real watershed moment will be when the central EU administration decides to standardize it. That might greatly encourage the other member nations to follow...
Redundant Department of Redundancy Department (Score:2)
I wonder if they'll have to file the specification for their ATM Machines in ODF Document Format?
Whats Ballmer goin' to do? (Score:2)
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Radar Operator: Sir, we seem to have a rather large object that just launched from somewhere in Washington state!
Supervisor: How big is the object and what trajectory?
Radar Operator: Crap! Uh, Sir, the object appears to be about 16,640 miles in diameter and looks like it is on a trajectory to impact somewhere in northern Europe!
Supervisor: Is there a heat signature? Is it a missile?
Radar Operator: Sensors detect no exhaust heat signature, or anything like that. However, there appear to be metal appendages o
you mean the Open ODF Document Format? (Score:2)
it wouldn't be modern slashdot if they didn't spelled out all the technical stuff for you constantly.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Insightful)
The state, in order to conduct its necessary business, needs to use some sort of document format. Even the most minimal of states would have to at least write the law code down somewhere.
The document format that the state uses affects the citizens of the state; because they must possess software capable of interpreting that format in order to usefully interact with the state.
Therefore, the state's use of a document format constitutes a state-imposed market distortion in favor of software that can interpret that format, and against software that cannot. Because the state's use of some document format is unavoidable, the imposition of this market distortion is unavoidable.
The more openly available, and widely adopted, and patent unencumbered the format is, the lower the barrier of entry to supporting it is, and the greater the amount of software that can support it will be. Therefore, the more open the document standard used by the state, the smaller the market distortion imposed by the state.
Any free market libertarian is therefore obligated to support the state's use of the most open and least encumbered formats available.
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Sir —
Well said.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Insightful)
By virtue of selecting the format that is easier for any product to support, they reduce the degree to which they interfere with the invisible hand's selection of the best product.
If they were to select a unique format, implemented by only a single product, they would be maximally constraining the invisible hand. Anybody who wanted to interact with the state would simply have to use the single product. By choosing a substantially open standard(pretty much all office suites that aren't Office already support it, Office supports it via at least two different plugin options and has native support on the roadmap) they have left the invisible hand largely free to choose the best product.
Had they said "No, only users of OO.org may interact with us", that would have been interference with free market competition between products. All they did was mandate a format, and they chose the format that imposed the least pressure on product selection.
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For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.
Please tell me where that is my stated opinion, because I strongly doubt your reading comprehension (and intelligence, fool). I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government measures office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does. But I think I hit a sore spot in the slashdot groupthink, going by the "-1, Disagree" moderation.
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That should read: "I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government isn't changing the market by measuring office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does."
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-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.
-- Go
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There are lots of companies who make standard nuts, wires, screws, tires, gasolines, insulation, etc.
If the government were to define a few standard cell phone chargers, then multiple companies would compete and cell phone chargers would probably cost about $6. Since they don't, off brand chargers are $13 and "brand" chargers from the cell store are $29.
Libertarian philosophy is fundamentally broken because it relies on a "magical" force to keep wealthy, powerful, individuals and companies in check and fai
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We all depend on patented technologies to go about our day-to-day lives. Does that make us slaves to patent owners?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk [youtube.com] i highly recommend that video explaining in a fun way what free market is and what is not.
there is no free market in existence for a century. What we have now globally is keynesianism which argues that government regulations and spending (central planning in disguise) is good for economy and politicians love that doctrine because they measure economic success with the GDP which can be inflated by government spending even with borrowed money ( gdp = consumption + in
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It isn't. In the US, at least, Banks are given the authorization to create an amount of money equal to 1/3 (I think. The fraction may be wrong.) of their deposits. They frequently cheat and exceed this fraction.
This is, therefore, a state granted monopoly. As such, any institution that profits from it cannot be used as an honest example of libertarianism in action (whether pro or con).
Then there are all the special state granted charters, limits on who can enter the market, etc.
Personally, I don't belie
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Um, you don't seem to know much about banks.
Banks, for the last few centuries, have functioned by taking money from some people, paying a small amount of interest on it, and then lending much of it to other people for higher interest rates. The difference between interest taken in and interest paid is where their operating expenses, capitalization, and profit come from. A bank that accepted deposits and didn't lend that money would have to charge people for keeping their money safe, and obviously would
Re:Wrong decision (Score:4, Informative)
dealt themselves a blow to their ability to interoperate with other people.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
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Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
So they'd lose more and more documents? I don't think you're thinking straight, they want it easy for people to upgrade and annoying for people who haven't. If Microsoft had any substantial degree of failure on that (no, anecdotes aren't proof) then Office would FAIL in company upgrade testing. "We are unable to migrate to Office 2007 because we would lose compatibility with vital documents and historical records". Do you see that happening? No, so reality doesn't care how many times that FUD is repeated ov
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Microsoft has substantial degrees of failure on all of their products and always have... This is largely why end users have come to expect computers to be unreliable devices to the point that it's considered a joke. Most users simply ignore problems that occur with microsoft software because they have become so used to it.
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more importantly, older versions cannot interoperate with newer versions, in an attempt to force everyone to upgrade once a few important people do so. MS was forced to release a docx interpreter for the older office programs because companies complained so much.
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Government documents often remain unchanged (and sometimes unlooked at) for the length of time necessary for a transition like Word 95 to Word 2007.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:4, Interesting)
I only mention this because it happens to me all of the time. Usually with different versions of MS Word but in this case it can't even read its own file from the same version.
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One of my teachers last semester created Powerpoints. He saved them in
*I have NO IDEA what version of office he was using to create them.* Likely to be 07 though
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Have YOU used MS Office? I open older documents EVERY day
What do you mean by "older" documents? I bet it's not from the early 1990s...
I used MS Word since the 1980s when it was a DOS program, and used WinWord 386 on Windows 386, and Word 1.0 on Windows 3.0. I have not tried to open any of those 1980s-era documents in recent versions of Word, but I can assure you that Word 95/97/2000/2003 all screw up on opening a Word 2.0 doc file (Word 2.0 is 1990s-era Windows only, and is much newer than Word 4 - MS version numbering inconsistencies again).
Microsoft retai
Shill, STFU (Score:2)
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How far back? I don't use it, so this is an honest question, but I had heard that the current MSOffice was unable to open MSWord98 documents.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Informative)
That's not entirely true, since Microsoft Office can support ODF. If their decision was about the benefits of an open file format then the choice of software to run should be irrelevant (meaning they could still run Microsoft Office everywhere instead of something like OpenOffice).
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My understanding was that MS Office's implementation of ODF (at least in Excel specifically) had some serious issues.
The "issue" in this case is that spreadsheet formulas (and some other things) are underspecified in the text of the standard (see here [gnome.org] and here [linux.com] and here [openmalaysiablog.com]), and the (proprietary) MSOffice implementation is different from the (proprietary) OO.org implementation. Specifically, MSOffice uses formulas as specified in ISO 29500:2008 (that is, ISO-amended OOXML).
This wasn't the case just between MSOffice and OO.org, by the way, other implementations had similar interop problems. One of the links above describes suc
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Interesting)
As a free market libertarian, I think this move sucks, and anyone with half a brain should too.
As a free market Libertarian, I think you'd be well advised to learn why a group would choose an open standard that multiple vendors can compete for, rather than a closed (ISO can kiss my ass), single-vendor product.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:4, Informative)
You're probably a MS shill but the simple fact is that there exists free plugins so that MS Office users can use ODF. One of them is made by Sun [sun.com] which currently is the only one with Enterprise support. Surprisingly the only company that does not make a plugin is MS itself. So who's appears to be hindering interoperability here?
I would like see the logic at which you arrived at this conclusion. Open Office is free so there is no higher cost there. ODF is an open format which means anyone can write applications that use it. The list of existing applications that use it includes Google Docs, WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony, etc. If anything, using MS Office incurs a higher cost because Danish citizens will be required to purchase it from MS to see Office proprietary formats.
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The funny thing is that all of those programs you mentioned also open
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The funny thing is that all of those programs you mentioned also open .doc files. Interesting for a closed format.
Well, they open it by reverse engineering the doc file format. So they are vulnerable to lawsuits by Microsoft, claiming they are violating the DMCA. Right now Microsoft is not suing them because the adverse publicity would be more than the additional revenue it would gain. But, if the alternative products get a toe hold, and start biting into Microsoft sales, it would hit back with lawsuits.
You could wonder, "it is my data, it is my doc file so how can you claim copy right?". But even if you win in court
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You're probably a MS shill but the simple fact is that there exists free plugins so that MS Office users can use ODF. One of them is made by Sun which currently is the only one with Enterprise support. Surprisingly the only company that does not make a plugin is MS itself.
Your information is outdated. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 supports ODF 1.1, to the extent it is specified by the corresponding ISO standard, out of the box - no plugins needed.
That said, GP is still wrong, since, one way or another, ODF can now be used with any major office suite.
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I'll take the bait and post this despite my dislike for Microsoft.
link [tectonic.co.za]
Also, their PR [microsoft.com]
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those 'other people' will have to adopt a format to do business with the government.
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How are you supposed to use a spreadsheet to calculate your taxes when there is no standard for formulas in spreadsheets?
Why would you want to use a spreadsheet? Our taxes are calculated automatically. If you have any changes to the proposal mailed to you, there is a web based system were you enter your new values and get it recalculated instantly.