On Tuesday 19 Oct 2010 02:28:36 Wm Stewart wrote: > > Thanks for your thoughtful response. I don't think we need round-tripping > to achieve the goal. My point is that getting the world to convert to ODF > when the majority software is Office is not working. And the world is not > converting to OO when it cannot handle the majority format in use now. > However, if we break the problem down into two manageable pieces - one of > the oldest techniques in the software book - the problem becomes solvable: > > 1. If OO could handle the last issues with MS formats (which it gets > closer to with every release) then the main barrier would be removed, and > people would switch for all the usual advantages - cost and openness. > > 2. Once the majority of users use OO, it would be a much easier step to > move to ODF for all the usual reasons - long term access and openness. > > I don't see the second step happening without the first step. If Oracle > can focus development resources on the first step, the second will follow.
The two most common issues I find with incompatibility between OOo and MSO tend to rotate around Fonts and tables especially in mixed platform environments. The fonts issue is reasonably easily fixed but it has to be done at the user end because MSO uses it's own proprietary fonts and OOo can't ship with them. Tables are still an issue but in an environment where round tripping is not a requirement then PDF export is the best solution. ODF support will come from the MSO end and OOo will get better with OOXML. Unfortunately I don't have any clients right now that work in a MSO07/10 - OOo mixed environment to say how that's going. ODF still has limitations, especially with spreadsheets and OOXML is a massive gludge of conflicting requirements and is not really supported that well in MSO in any case. The issue is that not one individual application development team, either MS or OOo can solve the problem on their own, or at least not without huge investment. It will take a substantial collaborative effort between the main parties, probably under the umbrella of OASIS, to solve it. But right now the cost benefit ratio does not add up. Our market share is rising at a substantial rate, part of that is due to a "reasonable" compatibility with legacy document types, for most use cases it is "good enough" and for OOo developers therefore we can say good enough is OK so we can focus on other functionality that gives us the best points of difference. Would I like 100% roundtripping capability? You bet, but not at the expense of all other areas of development, which is pretty much what it would require. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant. INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Open Technologies) www.theingots.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
