Gordon,

Gordon Burgess-Parker wrote:
On 15/04/2010 17:02, Regina Henschel wrote:
Hi all,

Gordon Burgess-Parker schrieb:
On 14/04/2010 21:44, Regina Henschel wrote:
Hi Lars, hi Jonathon,

Lars Nooden schrieb:
On 04/14/2010 08:14 PM, Regina Henschel wrote:
> not all of you are familiar with the problem.

The fact that MSO intentionally breaks ODF is very familiar to many,
perhaps everyone. That is not news.

It does not break ODF. The documents are valid ODF 1.1, at least our
validator [http://tools.services.openoffice.org/odfvalidator/] says
so. The users, who are forced by government or company policy to
produce ODF conform documents, can do this with Excel 2010. Therefore
I guess that there will be an increasing number of Excel-ods documents.


Hmmm. How do you work that one out?

I write an ods-document with Excel 2010 Beta and let the validator examine it.

 Open an ods file using the Sun ODF
plug-in in Excel 2007, everything is OK. Open an ods file natively in
Excel 2007 SP2 with it's alleged ODF compatibility and ALL the formulae
become values only

The start "Open an ods file" is not exact enough. There are Excel-ods and Calc-ods. Both are valid ODF documents. You can work with Excel-ods in Excel without problems and you can work with Calc-ods in Calc without problems. But you get problems in Calc, when you open a Excel-ods document.

I was talking about Calc ods. Calc ods existed long before any attempt by MS to replicate it in Office. If you open a Calc ods file in Excel 2007 SP2 IT IS BROKEN. The MS implementation of ODF is broken. If you use the Sun plug in it is NOT broken. Ergo - MS broke ODF implementation in Office 2007 deliberately, as I assume that their developers are not so dense that they couldn't assimilate the Sun code into Office...

please do not try to indoctrinate Regina because you seem to have some misunderstandings about standards, let me reiterate a comment I made before:
Conformance = Implementation meets Specification/Standard
Interoperability = Implementation meets Implementation

From a technical standpoint MSO 2007 writes conforming ODF, hence their implementation is not broken. Indeed the ODF spec an issue regarding formulas [1] [2], that MS has been using to create marketing buzz. What they are indeed breaking, likely intentionally, is interoperability with other ODF implementations. As OOo, Symphony etc. were available at that time, interoperability could have been easily achieved, of course. This is just another MS way to create vendor lock-in. Regina describes the practical symptoms very well.

BTW, to learn about MS Office breaking a standard I would recommend to
review a blog post written by Alex Brown [3]. AND! It's about MS's own standard OOXML.

Best regards,
Peter


[1] Jim Clark
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_%28XML_expert%29> raising this
issue at the ODF comment ML in February 2005:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200502/msg00000.html

[2] Tim Bray <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray> in a blog about the
OOoCon 2005:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/01/Open-Office-Conference
(see section "Bad Formula Trouble")

[3] http://adjb.net/post/Microsoft-Fails-the-Standards-Test.aspx


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