Hi Some time ago, OpenDocument was changed to use OpenDocument Formula (ODFF) instead of its custom legacy formula format. This was introduced in ODF 1.2, and OpenOffice.org 3.1 or so ( https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/ODFF_Implementation).
However a significant number of document export regressions happened, because some filters work not by exporting the document contents to their file format, but rather by converting from ODF to their file format, and still expect to see the old ODF <= 1.1 formulas. At least MS Office 2003 XML (bug 96018) and the legacy StarOffice XML (bug 95312) were broken this way by the ODF 1.2 formula change. It's possible to update these export filters to use ODF 1.2 formulas. The change is relatively simple, it's little other than an XML namespace change. That's what I already did for bug 96018 and plan on doing for bug 95312. However some users worked around this issue by setting their ODF version to 1.1 (in Tools > Options > Load/Save > General), so that formulas are written in the old format, which the MS Office 2003 XML and StarOffice XML filters expect. If, for this or any other reason, a user has their ODF version set to < 1.2, then my fixes will again break, because they expect the ODF 1.2 formula format instead. My question is this: do we care about ODF < 1.2? Should filters that convert from ODF only work with the latest version of ODF, or should they work with older ODF versions too? For formulas, it should be possible to support both the old and new ODF formulas quite easily. But I fear there may be other ODF features that complicate things much more. I also tested what LO does when saving formulas to MS Excel 2003 XML format (you have to File -> Export), to see what they did in terms of ODF version compatibility, but we can't learn anything useful as they still haven't fixed bug 96018 on their side ;-). Regards Damjan
