This is the state of formula interoperability among ODF spreadsheets today.

Is it time for Rob to step down as chair? I think so.

If your business model requires only conformance and not actually achieving interoperability, then I wish you well. But remember that conformance and interoperability are not mutually exclusive options. An application can be conformant to a standard and also be interoperable, if you use the legacy formula namespace and syntax. So the desire to be conformant is not an excuse for not also being interoperable, or at least not a valid excuse.

John McCreesh, OpenOffice's head of marketing, is veering towards independence, though. He said separately he felt the "right model" is for an independent legal entity to own the trademarks and have joint copyright of the code, with its own finance and governance.

Office 2007 ( OOXML ) import support will be in the next release this quarter.

If you say Groklaw is an echo chamber, for example, it has insulting connotations

Groklaw deserves respect

on a committee set up to help a national body

built-support for ODF 1.1.

The legacy formats are just popped into an OOXML wrapper

I posted this comment, which was deleted

I'm convinced they knew about it already, although it's only a guess

the fact that Microsoft would have received a copy

I just don’t get it

The Durban 2 conference in Geneva makes me think of a bizarre mashup of the first Durban conference and what I experienced at the OOXML BRM

Alex is right. National transposition is a procedural relic. We should get the specs right out of software vendors and just skip this standardization crap that only justifies to pay useless consultants whose status is construed as some kind of impartial judge. This kind of failed processes have led us to believe that standards and norms could be somehow trusted; as it unfortunately turns out, it stops to be true when strongly applied pressure by one large private monopoly meets the weak morals of the ones in charge of ensuring the process is being duly respected. Thank you Alex, for spelling out the truth. Your lack of impartiality and your strange behaviour during the OOXML standardization process have clarified how poorly qualified you are at patronizing others and lecturing on the ISO and other standards bodies’ processes. I wish you good luck for your next job at Microsoft.

I'm running the version we'll be releasing shortly, which has ODF 1.1 support, and it identifies the problem and offers to repair it