This had nothing to do with OOXML being accepted as an ISO Standard. It was and is.
It had to do with limitations of the ODF 1.0/1.1 specifications (and the ISO IS 26300:2006 standard for ODF 1.0) and deciding what to do about the formula specification in ODF 1.1 being totally implementation-dependent. Wisely or not, Microsoft chose to have formulas that would preserve Excel functionality and round-trip via ODF from Excel to Excel, the same that OpenOffice.org Calc chose its own formulas that roundtrip-via ODF among OpenOffice.org-based implementations. I was in the room when they ran that by a group of people in a Document Interoperability Initiative meeting and none of us thought how users could misunderstand what was happening. (The error messages, in particular, are less than helpful, but we had no idea about those at the time.) [In the meeting, the big topic was preservation of PowerPoint fidelity to ODF and back.] Now that ODF 1.2 does have an agreed specification for formulas and requires that to be used in fully-conforming ODF 1.2 Spreadsheet documents, we will see how implementations line up as there are releases from everyone that support OpenFormula. I believe that LibreOffice is already using OpenFormula in current releases. Microsoft's support for ODF 1.2 is not known at this time, although there is a meeting in Brussels in April where Microsoft is expected to provide more information. I repeat, the International Standard IS 26300:2006 for ODF 1.0 DOES NOT define spreadsheet formulas and leaves it implementation-dependent. The standard does specify how implementations are identified, though, and both Excel and OpenOffice.org accomplish that. (IS 29500, the International Standard for the Office Open XML (OOXML) has always had definitions of spreadsheet formulas and .xslx documents use those.) Eike Rathke, here, was one of the major contributors to the definition of OpenFormula, now in ODF 1.2, that will also be in an international standard once ODF 1.2 is accepted by ISO. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: webmaster for Kracked Press Productions [mailto:webmas...@krackedpress.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 08:46 To: users@global.libreoffice.org Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Calc corrupted an Excel xlsx file, should I report a bug? [ ... ] The fact that ODF is the International Standard for Office suite file formats over MS, even though it is still a "growing" format tells us a lot, or at least to me. It seems that the developers of ODF is slowly adding the parts that need "formal" definitions instead of doing it quickly and badly as MS sometimes does. I believe MS has tried to do everything they could to get on the controlling group of ODF and to have one more avenue for controlling the office suite market. [ MS - if we make ODF bad enough, then people will not use it or FOSS for their office needs and come back to "us" ] So, after all the ranting and raving, if you need to use MS Excel for the spreadsheet client, just save it as .xls instead of .ods. I do not think MS will ever read/write the same version of ODF as everyone else uses unless they own/control the format, and that will never happen. [ ... ] -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
