What’s distinctive about the goals of OOXML? Primarily, to have full fidelity with pre-existing binary documents created in Microsoft Office. “What people want is to make sure that their billions of important documents can be saved in a format where they don’t lose any information. As a design goal, we said that those formats have to represent all the information that enables high-fidelity migration from the binary formats”, says Paoli. He mentions work with institutions including the British Library and the US Library of Congress, concerned to preserve the information in their electronic archive.
I asked Paoli if such users could get equally good fidelity by converting their documents to ODF. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I am very clear on that. Those two formats are done for different reasons.”
What can go wrong? Paoli gives as an example the myriad ways borders can be drawn round tables in Microsoft Office and all its legacy versions. “There are 100 ways to draw the lines around a table,” he says. “The Open XML format has them all, but ODF which has not been designed for backward compatibility, does not have them. It’s really the tip of the iceberg. So if someone translates a binary document with a table to ODF, you will lose the framing details. That is just a very small example.”
Group items tagged
LOL :: Microsoft's Jean Paoli on the XML document debate - 0 views
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“Open Document Format and Office Open XML have very different goals”, says Paoli, responding to the claim that the world needs only one standard XML format for office documents. “Both of them are formats for documents … both are good.”
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The door should have been slammed shut on OOXML near five years ago when, on December 14th, 2006, at the very first OASIS ODF TC meeting, Stellent's Phil Boutros proposed that the charter include, "compatibility with existing file formats and interoperability with existing applications" as a priority objective.
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I put it to Paoli that OOXML is hard to implement because of all its legacy support, some of which is currently not well documented. “I don’t believe that at all. It’s actually the opposite,” he says. He make the point that third parties like Corel, which have previously implemented support for binary formats like .doc and .xls, should find it easy to transition to OOXML. “We believe Open XML adoption by vendors like Corel will be very easy because they have already been doing 90% of the work, doing the binary formats. The features are already there.”
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WordPerfect does an excellent import of MSWord .doc documents. But there is no conversion! It's a read only rendering. Once you start editing the document in WP, all kinds of funny things happen, and the perfect fidelity melts away like the wicked witch of west in a bucket full of water.
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Tim Anderson interviews Microsoft's Jean Paoli about MOOXML and ODF. Jean Paoli of course has the predictable set of answers. But Tim anderson provides us with some interesting insights and comments of his own. There is also a gem of a comment from Stephane Rodriquez, the reknown spreadsheet expert.
The bottom line for Microsoft has not changed. MOOXML exists because of the need for an XML file format compatible with the legacy of existing MSOffic ebinary documents. He claims that ODF is not compatible, and offers the "page borders" issue as an example.
Page borders? What's that got to do with the ODF file format? These are application specific, application bound proprietary graphics that can not be ported to any other application - like OpenOffice. The reason has nothign whatsoever to do with ODF and everything to do with the fact that the page border library is bound to MSOffice and not available to other applications like OpenOffice.
So here is an application specific feature tha tJean Paoli claims can not be expressed in ODF, but can in MOOXML. But when are running the da Vinci ODF plugin in MSWord, there is no problem whatsoever in capturing the page borders in ODF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No problem!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is opening up that same da Vinci MSWord document in OpenOffice. That's where the page borders are dropped. The issue is based entirely on the fact that OpenOffice is unable to render these MSWord specific graphics bound to an MSOffice only library.
If however we take that same page border loaded da Vinci MSWord document, and send it half way across the world to another MSWord desktop running da Vinci, the da Vinci plugin easily loads the ODF document into MSWord where it is perfectly rendered, page borders and all!!!!!!!!
Now i will admit that this is one very difficult issue to understand. If not f -
Great interview. Tim can obviously run circles around poor Jean Paoli.
Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability - 0 views
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Standards-Based Interoperability
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05 June 09
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Interoperability without Standards
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Diagrams here are eye-catching.
LibreOffice 4.3 boosts document compatibility | InfoWorld - 0 views
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"Version 4.3 of LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite developed by the Document Foundation and derived from the OpenOffice.org project, was released today. Aside from the usual array of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more cross-compatible with Microsoft Office, version 4.3 has features that give files from legacy Macintosh productivity software a new lease on life. Take control! 30 essential OS X command-line tips Go beyond the graphical user interface and take full advantage of Mac OS X at the command line READ NOW Most of the improvements around file handling in 4.3 involve better support for various aspects of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format used by Microsoft for its productivity software. LibreOffice users have often complained of opening Word 2010 or Word 2013 documents and finding that the formatting had been mangled or features like annotations hadn't survive being resaved in LibreOffice. Version 4.3 preserves many more of the attributes used in OOXML documents, such as style attributes for text and images. Also new to this edition of LibreOffice is import support for document formats created by a slew of legacy Macintosh applications: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and Wingz. Likewise, Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases -- not just word processing documents -- can now also be imported into LibreOffice. Another change, which might not directly affect many users but hints at how the refactoring of LibreOffice's code is reaching many legacy issues, involves the lengths of paragraphs. Previously, paragraphs in a LibreOffice document couldn't exceed 65,000 characters due to a bug in the underlying OpenOffice.org code that had persisted for over a decade and remained unclosed. Other changes include comments that can now be "printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported," according to the Document Foundation; better behaviors for sp
Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : Open XML support in older versions of Office - 0 views
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The big thing I'm waiting for is other applications like OpenOffice to support custom defined schemas. This would mean that rather than simply sharing wordprocessing or spreadsheet information, we can share actual customer information. For example you could take health care data, or invoice data, or RFP data from one of the applications and move it over to the other without losing that semantic meaning. It would be like that demo many of you have seen me do where I take data from a table in Excel and move it over to Word where it's formatted more like a catalog.
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The big thing I'm waiting for is other applications like OpenOffice to support custom defined schemas. This would mean that rather than simply sharing wordprocessing or spreadsheet information, we can share actual customer information. For example you c
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The big thing I'm waiting for is other applications like OpenOffice to support custom defined schemas. This would mean that rather than simply sharing wordprocessing or spreadsheet information, we can share actual customer information. For example you c
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The big thing I'm waiting for is other applications like OpenOffice to support custom defined schemas. This would mean that rather than simply sharing wordprocessing or spreadsheet information, we can share actual customer information. For example you c
ODF - the state of play - The future of ODF under OASIS, now that the... - 1 views
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"ODF - open document format - is an open, XML-based rich document format that has been adopted as the standard for exchanging information in documents (spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents), by many governments and other organisations (see, for example, here), including the UK Government. This is despite strong opposition by Microsoft; but I have seen Microsoft's proposed "open XML" standard and, frankly, it is huge and horrid (in the word of standards, these go together). If I remember correctly, the early draft I saw even incorporated recognition of early Excel leap-year bugs into the standard. ODF is now a pukka ISO standard, maintained by OASIS, under the proud banner: "The future is interoperability". My personal thoughts, below, are prompted by an ODF session at ApacheCon Core titled "Beyond OpenOffice: The State of the ODF Ecosystem" held by Louis Suárez-Potts (community strategist for Age of Peers, his own consultancy, and the Community Manager for OpenOffice.org, from 2000 to 2011), and attended by very few delegates - perhaps a sign of current level of interest in ODF within the Apache community. Nevertheless, and I am talking about the ODF standard here, not Apache Open Office (which is currently my office software of choice) or its Libre Office fork (which seems to be where the excitement, such as it is, is, for now), the standards battle, or one battle, has been won; we have a useful Open Document Format, standardised by a recognised and mature standards organisation, and even Microsoft Office supports it. That's good. So what could be the problem? Well, I don't care whether I use ODF from Open Office, Libre Office or even Office 365, I just want to be sure that everyone else can read my ODF documents (with a .odt, .ods or .odp extension, for text, presentation or spreadsheet, respectively), with whatever software they like; and that they'll either see exactly the functionality and formatting I see; or a well defined (an
Wizard of ODF: OASIS invited to join Microsoft in the DIN technical report - harmoniz... - 0 views
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the WG is busy working on a first draft. This'll include mainly work in Wordprocessing. Spreadsheet and Presentation is still in the very early work. So help from the ODF TC would be great --- and a liaison would make sense IMHO. To give you an idea why help from the ÓDF TC would be needed I'll briefly outline some questions which arose: * Need for more use-cases, i.e. feasable interop scenarios * Discussions of unspecified behaviour (e.g numbering in 1.0, spreadsheet formulas, compatibilty options, etc.) and their impact on interop scenarios * Questions regaring generic settings like e.eg. form:control-implementation="ooo:com.sun.star.form.component.Form", or tweaking a la http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=51726. * Possible interop problems not handled by the specs (e.g. graphics, WMF, EMF, SVM, etc.) or e.g. font metrics and font embedding. As you see there are a lot of overlapping areas with eg. the "ODF interop" we dealt with in the workshop in Barcelona. [This issue is hosted in the Adoption TC, right? Maybe this TC is also suited as a liaison partner?]
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Uh Oh. Microsoft and Novell joined the EU's call to harmonize ODF and OOXML, but Sun and IBM refused the invite. Now we have the invite in front of the OASIS ODF TC!. Is there any rock big enough for them to hide under if they also refuse?
And if the OASIS ODF does join the EU-DIN-ISO effort, where doe stha tleave IBM, Sun and their inistance on a politically mandated "rip out and replace" as the only acceptable solution?
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Gray Matter : Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads - 0 views
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The Compatibility Pack, software that allows you to open, edit and save Open XML format documents in Office XP and 2003 has now been downloaded over 100 million times.
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Also includes stats in table form indicating that according to Google Search OOXML documents now outnumber ODF documents on the Web, for word processor documents, spreadsheet documents, and presentation documents.
Front-page: What is the definition of an "existing document"? - 0 views
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Can you provide a definition of what an "existing documents" means?
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"Existing documents" refer to both binary Microsoft Office documents as well as ECMA-376 1st Ed. documents.
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This is defined in the scope of OOXML: ISO/IEC 29500 defines a set of XML vocabularies for representing word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On the one hand, the goal of ISO/IEC 29500 is to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations that had been produced by the Microsoft Office applications (from Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008, inclusive) at the date of the creation of ISO/IEC 29500.
An Antic Disposition: Protocols, Formats and the Limits of Disclosure - 2 views
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it strips out ODF spreadsheet formulas
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Telling ellision. I think Rob means "OpenOffice.org spreadsheet formulas" ...
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interoperability is achieved by converging on a common interpretation of the format
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Or, rather more effectively, by drafting the standard competently enough that the need for "intepretation" is, in practice, eliminated ...
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However, from an interoperability perspective, MCE doesn't cut it. MCE is really just hand waving and pixie dust.
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That is absolutely correct - MCE is not an interop tool or panacea - it is a compatibility-tool.
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Why you don't need MS Office - The Standard - 0 views
OpenDocument Lawn Jockey Knowledge base - 0 views
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he OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. The file format makes transformations to other formats simple by leveraging and reusing existing standards wherever possible. As an open standard under the stewardship of OASIS, ODF also creates the possibility for new types of applications and solutions to be developed other than traditional office productivity applications.
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The Knowledge Base description and history of OpenDocuemnt
Groklaw - Microsoft, antitrust and innovation, by Georg Greve - 0 views
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Interoperability: The second abusive practice the Commission found Microsoft guilty of is the deliberate obstruction of interoperability, generally achieved through arbitrary and willful modification of Open Standards. This makes it impossible for competitors to write interoperable software. This is to the detriment of customers, who find themselves locked into the products of one vendor, the antithesis of competition.
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It might look much worse in the light of public statements that Microsoft will not even commit to standards that it has proposed itself, such as the recent Microsoft OfficeOpenXML (OOXML) format it wants approved by ISO. The less people talk about the interoperability side of the case, the better for Microsoft. Otherwise people might connect MS-OOXML to the fact that Microsoft initiated the standardisation effort in the workgroup server area to open the market and later started obstruction of interoperability on its own standard to drive the innovator out of the market.
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Great point. I think tha tanytime a big vendor embraces an open standard they should committ to full public documentation and explanation of any eXtensions to their implementaiton of that standard. Interoperability matters!
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Excellent explanation of Microsoft's problems in Europe. One can only hope that the successor to the Bush Administration is paying attention.
Is It Game Over? - ODF Advocate Andy UpDegrove is Worried. Very Worried - 0 views
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This seems to me to be a turning point for the creation of global standards. Microsoft was invited to be part of the original ODF Technical Committee in OASIS, and chose to stand aside. That committee tried to do its best to make the standard work well with Office, but was naturally limited in that endeavor by Microsoft's unwillingness to cooperate. This, of course, made it easier for Microsoft to later claim a need for OOXML to be adopted as a standard, in order to "better serve its customers." The refusal by an incumbent to participate in an open standards process is certainly its right, but it is hardly conduct that should be rewarded by a global standards body charged with watching out for the best interests of all.
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Andy UpDegrove takes on the issue of Microsoft submitting their proprietary "XML alternative to PDF" proposal to Ecma for consideration as an international standard. MS XML-PDF will compliment ECMA 376 (OOXML - OfficeOpenXML) which is scheduled for ISO vote in September of 2007. Just a bit over 60 days from today.
Andy points out some interesting things; such as the "Charter" similarities between MS XML-PDF and MS OOXML submisssions to Ecma:
MS XML-PDF Scope: The goal of the Technical Committee is to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats. The aim is to enable the implementation of the Office Open XML Formats by a wide set of tools and platforms in order to foster interoperability across office productivity applications and with line-of-business systems. The Technical Committee will also be responsible for the ongoing maintenance and evolution of the standard. Programme of Work: Produce a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format and XML-based page description language which is consistent with existing implementations of the format called the XML Paper Specification,…[in each case, emphasis added]
If that sounds familiar, it should, because it echoes the absolute directive of the original OOXML technical committee charter, wh
Ripped Off by Rob Weir - Again - 0 views
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An intriguing idea is whether we can have it both ways. Suppose you are in an ODF editor and you have a "Save for archiving..." option that would save your ODF document as normal, but also generate a PDF version of it and store it in the zip archive along with ODF's XML streams. Then digitally sign the archive along with a time stamp to make it tamper-proof. You would need to define some additional access conventions, but you could end up with a single document that could be loaded in an ODF editor (in read-only mode) to allow examination of the details of spreadsheet formulas, etc., as well as loaded in a PDF reader to show exactly how it was formated.
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Intriguing? Rob Weir knows full well that the Foundation proposed this exact same feature set as part of the da Vinci Plug-in design for Massachusetts, July of 2006!!!!!!!!!
The Complete Feature list of the da Vinci plug-in for MSOffice that was proposed and signed off on by CIO Louis Gutierrez in early August of 2006 was well known by IBM's representatives who were working hand in hand with us at the time: Rob Weir, Don Harbison and Doug Heintzman.
Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to create a "benefactors Group" to overcome the challenge that Massachusetts ITD did not have a budget. IBM and Oracle selected Google, Sun, Novell, Intel, and Nokia as key benefactors. The group was provided with the complete feature set and roadmap for da Vinci development.
The da Vinci roadmap was the schedule announced by Louis Gutierrez in his mid year report, August 17th, 2006.
The da Vinci plug-in feature set, in order of priority, consisted of:
ODF iX Approval at OASISPlug-in for MS WORDAccessibility Interface for all ODF documents in MS WordPDF - ODF iX Digital Signature containerPlug-in for MS ExcelInteroperability Wizard for OpenOfficePlug-in for PowerPointXForms InterfaceThe roadmap we provided Louis and the "benefactors" was sceduled out with deliverables, test periods, and cost per deliverable. The buy-in per "benefactor" was set at $350,000, and i
ODF 1.2? You're dreaming! Microsoft starts rolling out more OOXML translators | Mary... - 0 views
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Over the next three months, Microsoft will be releasing new and updated translators designed to aid customers who want interoperability between Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and other document formats, including Open Document Format (ODF). On December 4, Microsoft began rolling out three new translators that it plans to make available this month: A 1.1 update of its translator for Word; an Open XML spreadsheet translator and a presentation translator. Additionally, in February 2008, Microsoft will deliver the final version of its translator designed to provide interoperability between the Chinese-government backed Uniform Office Format (UOF) file format and OOXML. Microsoft announced the creation of the SourceForge-hosted Open Translation Project in July 2006. At that time, the Softies said the translator-focused initiatve was started “in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format.” Vijay Rajagopalan, a Microsoft Principal Architect, provided the update on the OOXML-ODF translation work during the XML 2007 conference on Decmeber 4. During the XML 2007 interoperability panel — sponsored by Microsoft and of which Rajagopalan was a part — the ongoing battles that have raged for the past couple of years between Microsoft and the backers of ODF were a mere sidenote.
Is ODF designed to be not implementable without source code? - Wouter - 0 views
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How come I am the one to notice how deficient ODF really is?
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"But mummy, he's not *wearing* any clothes ..."
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Exactly! It's not that ODF is under-specified. It's that ODF can't be fully specified until OpenOffice is completely documented and capable of supporting expected features. There is this famous quote from Sun's Svante Schubert that pretty much says it all; "Nothing goes into the ODF specification unless it's supported by OpenOffice". The statement was made at a meeting of the OASIS ODF Metadata SC while discussing the controversial use of "XML ID". IBM's Elias Torres, of RDFa fame, was passionately arguing that use of the XML ID should be left open to all developers. Sun had taken the position that XML ID should be limited to only a handful of elements supported by OpenOffice. The discussion acutally got far worse than the quote would indicate. Elias compromised his arguments suggesting that we should allow developers to have at it with XML ID for at least one year, and then revisit the issue. This suggestion lead to a discussion of how developers implementing elements with metadata would notify the metadata sub committee of their use case. A discussion list was proposed. The idea being that developers would send in their use cases and the oligarchs on the sub c would approve or disprove. Incredibly, this suggestions was shot down by Bruce d'Arcus (OpenDocument Foundation). Bruce thought that any developer needing metadata support for particular elements should have to join the OASIS ODF Metadata SC like everyone else before their needs would be considered. ( i.e. - like the other oligarchs). At the next weeks meeting, Rob Weir showed up with a list of 14 spreadsheet related elements that IBM needed XML ID support for. Sun representatives Svante Schubert and Michael Brauer immediately approved the use, agreeing that OpenOffice would support that implementation. This how things work at OASIS ODF. Ever wonder why SVG or XForms support in ODF is so limited? It's because the specification directly reflects the limits of the OpenOffice implement
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Sorry. Diigo cut my comment off about half way through. I've complained to Wade and Maggie about this problem, especially how it impacts and cripples the "Group Auto-Blog Post" feature . Months have gone by. Yet still the issue remains.
Where is there an end of it? | Notes on Document Conformance and Portability #3 - 0 views
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a calm look at some of the issues
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Still, not all of the subsequent comments are calm…
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Microsoft’s implementation decision
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an implementation of ODF which does not interoperate with other available implementations
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Doug Mahugh - 0 views
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This is the state of formula interoperability among ODF spreadsheets today.
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He's right, but I'm not sure this blog posting will attract as much fuss as Rob's red boxes ...
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An implementation is permitted to provide an implicit conversion from string-constant to number. However, the rules by which such conversions take place are implementation-defined. [Example: An implementation might choose to accept "123"+10 by converting the string "123" to the number 123. Such conversions might be locale-specific in that a string-constant such as "10,56" might be converted to 10.56 in some locales, but not in others, depending on the radix point character. end example]
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So in other words, OOXML doesn't say anything about string conversion either.
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OpenDocument - Formula - 0 views
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OpenDocument already supports the inclusion of arbitrary formula languages for spreadsheet documents.
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and (for conformance fetishists) the important word here is "arbitrary".
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".... I really hope I'm missing something, because, frankly, I'm speechless. You cannot be serious. You have virtually zero interoperability for spreadsheet documents. OpenDocument has the potential to be extraodinarily valuable and important standard. I urge you not to throw away a huge part of that potential by leaving such a gaping hole in your specification...". Claus Agerskov further commented that this provided a means of creating lock-in (my emphasis)
"OpenDocument doesn't specify the formulars used in spreadsheets so every spreadsheet vendor can implement formulars in their own way without being an open standard. This way a vendor can create lock-in to their spreadsheets"