Summary: Never even try to use M$ Office Excerpts from http://homembit.com/2009/05/microsoft-now-attempt-to-fragment-odf.html
"The technical details are all on Rob’s blog, but in summary, when opening an ODF spreadsheet (.ods file) using Office 2007, it simply removes all existing formulas without telling anything to the user, leaving only the values in cells (results of formulas evaluation, previously stored in the document). If a user wants to test the ODF support in Office, and without giving due attention, save an existing spreadsheet, will overwrite the document removing all the formulas (as if you were writing a table). I saw absurdities in life, but nothing compared to this. When using Office 2007 to generate a new worksheet, the formulas will be stored in a way that only will be understood by Office 2007 (or by CleverAge, an MS Office plug-in to support ODF, developed as Open Source and sponsored by Microsoft), eliminating the possibility that any other existing application could be used to usefully read the document. While the first problem simply throw out all the business intelligence inside the spreadsheet (formulas), the second locks in the user on Office 2007 forever (we have seen this movie before…). The justification that could be used by Microsoft about it, is the lack of spreadsheet formula definition in ODF 1.0/1.1. Interesting to note that in ODF 1.2 (which is developed with the participation of Microsoft) this problem has been resolved with the creation of OpenFormula). The first comparative table of Rob’s post, summarizes a test on the same subject that he did a few weeks ago, it is easy to see that even without any spreadsheet formula definition inside ODF 1.1, interoperability between the tested set of existing applications ( KOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs, Symphony and Sun’s plug-in for Office) really exists on the real world (except for CleverAge that presented some problems). This means that all other developers are not concerned only to ‘comply with standard’s requirements’ (conformance) but also in developing a truly useful and interoperable application to users. Rob also says that the set of formulas used by these applications (based on OpenOffice) was developed based on existing formulas from Excel (at least ironic, huh?). Microsoft Office 2007 does not support encryption (password protection) in ODF documents ! I generated a simple text document (.odt) in ODF using OpenOffice and saved it with password protection. I sent the document (and password) to several friends and the result was the same: MS Office cannot open the document because it is password protected (some of those friends also have installed on their computers other tools that support ODF and on 100% of those tools it worked). I also asked them to generate a document in Office 2007 with password protection and send me, but they said that when trying to do this, MSOffice presented a warning message saying that you cannot use password protection using the ODF format. I would really like to find a good technical explanation for this, since the encryption and password protection are fully specified in ODF 1.0/1.1 (item 17.3 of the specification), and they are using existing algorithms, very familiar to any developer. A comment from Rob in his post (that not dealt with the encryption) is able to comment with mastery the problem I found (and I fully agree with him): “…I was taught to never assume malice where incompetence would be the simpler explanation. But the degree of incompetence needed to explain SP2’s poor ODF support boggles the mind and leads me to further uncharitable thoughts… ” " Read More at http://homembit.com/2009/05/microsoft-now-attempt-to-fragment-odf.html http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2009/05/06/odf-with-no-excuse/ _______________________________________________________ Best A. Mani -- A. Mani ASL, CLC, AMS, CMS http://amani.topcities.com _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
