Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop. Back when the consumer internet was young, there were concerns about …
"if you wanted to open a file created by it, you had to be running a copy of the suite yourself."
It was a little more than that: if you wanted to open a file created by the latest version of it in its default format you had to be running buy the current version of the suite yourself irrespective of how many older versions you may have bought.
No, I bought it from a stand where it had the Office logo copied in black and white on a piece of paper inside a clear plastic envelope, with a Dr. Hank CD-R media inside, and the serial number written on the back of that piece of paper with a felt pen, and also the same serial written on the CD-R itself.
Later they added a serial.txt to the CD itself, but that was years after the first versions.
t you had to be running buy the current version
Or download the compatibility updates. For example:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100314133818/http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466
https://download.cnet.com/microsoft-office-compatibility-pack-for-word-excel-and-powerpoint-file-formats/3000-18483_4-10648733.html#:~:text=Microsoft%20Office%20Compatibility%20Pack%20makes%20files%20created%20with,version%20of%20Office,%20this%20download%20will%20fix%20it.
Depending on what I'm doing, I use RTF. If I'm getting fancy, PDF works. I like images like JPG that can easily scale in size. There are other ways of doing things, but I'm a relatively simple soul. I can't tell you how many document formats I've gone through. Most of them were proprietary. but those three formats are almost computer Esperanto.
"...The text would usually survive but all the formatting and images would go kerblam..." so... just like opening an older format created by an MS product then? :-)
Also, I can confirm that in 2009, NATO were not mandating ODF for document sharing. Or if they were, they kept it very quiet.
Well I was there, working for Microsoft at the time. Of course I cannot provide proof here (nor would I even if I could - ultimately I have nothing to prove to a stranger with a bad attitude on the internet) and you're welcome to your [incorrect] scepticism but I would suggest my actual on site experience trumps your assumption.
Now, though, I would suggest that:
i. Given it was only formally adopted as "one of" their mandatory standards in July 2008, it hadn't filtered through at the time I was there (it's a huge organisation when all said and done)
ii. The key here is "one of" - i.e. not "the" mandated standard.
iii. I was there for Microsoft. They don't give a shit about what they would perceive at the time as artificially enforced standards.
Although the follow-up link is broken, here is a link to an article noting its inclusion: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/egovernment/news/eu-nato-makes-odf-one-its
So now, where is *your* source to back up your assumption we are wrong?
That's actually not true: Hotmail can open any Office document when in a desktop browser window.
Mail yourself the file to your free Hotmail account and click, it'll give you an option to view the file. Quite ironically, if you choose choose to print the file it'll *convert* the file to PDF to download (!) - an interesting way to get that conversion but it works just the same.
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Civil servant here, day job is authoring. Never once have I received or downloaded a shared UK gov document in anything other than Office or PDF formats. A certain supplier makes it hard to create and export in ODF and nobody in government service either has a clue or gives a shit. If I attempt to share an ODF I get "stop that weird shit you idiot!" type responses.
"You're breaking the Gov mandate."
"La la la! There goes another one. let's go for a coffee."
>Sigh!< Latte, one sugar, please.
It seems to be a mix on public facing UK government websites for downloads.
Some are pdf, csv, ods, or xlsx formats.
I am not sure if this is prevalent, but some programmes about students, they are mandated by Universities to use Word format. This seems to imply that students must have Microsoft products. If this is the state at the moment, then it is a shame that people are supporting a monopoly position which costs.
From your text, even those people working in the civil service don't follow mandated requirements internally.
Maybe Reform UK could take up the challenge in their threats to implement a DOGE like approach to the recent wins in the UK local council referendums.
(i shall not be holding my breath)
I'm sure that some universities or schools do mandate that students use Office to create their Office format documents, but most just specify that they have to be in that format. I used LibreOffice to make them, and nobody ever complained about that, probably because they had no way of knowing I had but also because, as long as it opens in whatever they chose to use, they were happy.
Don't really mandate it (office), but everyone gets a copy while they work here or are students. Even our telephone service it MS now. I do know people who use libreoffice for work and have had to translate student documents in ods format. Not often but occasionally. it used to be much more of a free for all, people randomly used xywrite, wordperfect, nota bene or whatever they liked. Used to have a program that could translate between most of these formats and more.
"From your text, even those people working in the civil service don't follow mandated requirements internally."
Replaying as a civil servant, but not the OP: A big part of the problem is that the civil service (capitalised if you please) isn't a single body. There's 24 ministerial departments and whilst there's a good few shared services and policies, ultimately they report to different minsters and so there are lots of detail differences all over the place, different IT arrangements etc.
"Maybe Reform UK could take up the challenge in their threats to implement a DOGE like approach "
Be careful what you wish for. Before becoming a civil servant, I spent three decades in senior roles in the private sector, and most but not all of what the public think they know about the civil service is wrong. Overall efficiency is actually very, very good - administration costs are about 1.25% of the total overseen budget. If anything, that's a quarter of what is required, using the world's largest companies as benchmarks for organisational administration. But there's a consequence of that leanness, in that it can't pay competitive salaries for a lot of roles and suffers accordingly, relies on poorly paid junior staff and sometimes things go badly wrong. It's very difficult to separate out incompetence of civil servants versus politicians, but all too often the civil service end up taking the rap for the incompetence or refusal to listen of the politicians - look at the Horizon scandal, and the fact that politicians were warned in advance, but insisted the project went ahead. Likewise BSE. I strongly suspect ESR falls in the same category. Sometimes it is civil servants - the IT mess at HMRC, for example. But when you can't afford to even pay a competitive project manager salary, what are the chances that HMRC management have expert advice or knowledge to guide them?
Likewise BSE. I strongly suspect ESR falls in the same category.
Even the popular science press was outraged at the damage done to egg sales cause by the (true) statement that (raw eggs aren't safe to eat if you are immune compromised, and should be avoided by the very old and the very young).
When BSE happened only a couple of years later, I blamed publications like New Scientist. Both for failing to support the politician over the temporary Egg Sales Collapse, and for failing to correct later.
BSE was clearly a political failure, but if it wasn't also a Civil Service failure, you're going to have to convince me that the Civil Service wasn't also traumatized by the Egg Outrage .
Second AC civil servant replying again:
"BSE was clearly a political failure, but if it wasn't also a Civil Service failure, you're going to have to convince me that the Civil Service wasn't also traumatized by the Egg Outrage"
You have to allow that the Civil Service is the administrative branch of government, and that all policy decisions are made by ministers. No matter what our view of a government policy, a Civil Servant's job is to keep our mouths shut about the behind the scenes stuff, and to administer the will of elected politicians. There is even a code of conduct that's part of our wider employment T&Cs that says as much, in politer terms. As individuals, all Civil Servants have opinions, have political beliefs, but it's our job to be absolutely impartial.
So any major decision goes up the tree to the relevant minister, and each night they'll get a box of documents to review and either select an option, approve a course of action, query or reject. This can be 70-200 documents per day. You may already have a view about most minister's prior knowledge of the department they head up, but now consider that after the requirements of eating, washing, sleeping, how much time does each decision get? A couple of minutes for most. Bigger policy choices will be the subject of meetings between Civil Servants and ministers and multiple policy papers. There's also the sometimes helpful, often malign influence of special advisors to give things a further stir. Often, even the minister's choices are constrained by a commitment made by some higher ranking but even more clueless minister, or an election campaign pledge. Look at the mess Labour have got into by pledging not to put up individual tax rates or NI.
There's many things that are utterly stupid that ministers choose to do, things that Civil Servants can see will not work, investments not supported by a credible business case or decisions not supported by (or even contrary to) evidence and data. Behind closed doors Civil Servants will often point that out, but the minister has absolute authority over their department, and when they make a decision it isn't within our gift to challenge. Look at Net Zero, a wildly expensive policy that has been committed to by Labour, Tories, Libdems, Greens, and parochialist parties; Yet there's no modelling of what this will actually require in terms of investment, how much it will eventually cost, nor what the most sensible way of achieving it is (and it certainly isn't solar, and probably not wind either). Think as well of the ministers who are too angry, nasty people who won't listen and just shout at their staff (a certain Tory Home Secretary for example), or are simply so stupid that they can't understand anything behind the decisions they're being asked to make (a certain Tory minister for culture, media and sport).
Taking the eggs>BSE debate, I agree, many Civil Servants will have been dismayed by the backlash, but I doubt that affected the BSE-enabling decisions. Those were driven by the intensive farming interests who wanted to turn vegetarian animals into cannibals, and were making an economic case for it - but the important point there is that started back in the 1970s, and the first known human fatality was circa 1994. Remember also that it was Edwina Currie who held out on salmonella in eggs, it was instrumental in her downfall, and it was John Gummer who was the minister feeding burgers to his daughter to show how safe they were (again, before it was recognised as transmissible to humans, but at a point when cross-species transmission had been observed). The 1970s decision was clearly wrong, but that's mostly with the benefit of hindsight. The Thatcher/Major governments' handling of it as it emerged as a problem was based on limited and unclear science, and a lack of due caution, but as already stated, it is always the minister's decision.
This is through rose-tinted glasses and not my experience of working in a senior position in the Civil Service. Decisions by Ministers are heavily dependent on what the civil servants decide to reveal and how it is worded.
It travels up the very rigid and inflexible chain of command in the Civil Service. As it does, it becomes summarised, messaged etc to a point where it loses its intent or becomes distorted. There are many ways to hide the bias or some hidden agenda or some precedence that has to be maintained so past decisions are not questioned. There are many ways to show certainty when there is none but the civil servant is expected to know and will just oblige (their repuation is at stake).
In same cases it is very subjective or a complex balance of probabilities which they are ill-equiped to assess. They are all generalists (and out of touch) so many issues require external specialist who they are at the mercy of and cannot really assess or manage. Ministers (many square pegs in round holes) have very little time (or only show half an interest) and have insufficient depth (or no depth) and every civil servant knows what will swing it with misrepreentation and concealment.
Similar here, Public Sector, Education then Private Sector.
There is this obsession touted by some media forums and then amplified by people who just KNOW that all Public Sector/Civil Servant employees are total wasters, especially if they work from home.
Everything that they think they don't use or consume is a complete waste and in their view those employees add no value to anything.
To most people with these views the only function that the public sector should be doing is emptying the bins.
I thought holding my breath comment gave away my sarcasm.
The reason the populist rubbish gets people to vote for them is because the truth is never explained to the people, and the "news" and "political" channels also ignore the truth, and allow the populists to make false comments unchallenged.
For Birmingham, i am with the refuse collectors - why should they take up to £8k per year pay cut.
>At least my council didn't have its elections this year
Mine (Derbyshire) did, now we can just feed them the rope and see if they can really hang (politically and economically) themselves. It could be painful but might just give a reality lesson before the next General Election
If the Birmingham Council staff, all the way up the pole to the head of the Council were to take an equivalent percentage pay cut to show solidarity and demonstrate the seriousness of the problem they might have a case, but they're just giving those with most to lose and least ability to recover from the loss a good kicking. So the budgetary 'problem' clearly isn't that serious.
That won't be difficult given the damage that Lab has done in my area. Money that was ring-fenced for a new sports centre has suddenly disappeared. No new sports centre for us.
Councillors not returning pone calls, emails or even holding sugeries. That's the new Lab party for you and reform is just more of the same around here. BNP and UKIP rejects who hate ALL immigrants which won't go down well as 30% of the electorate are immigrants who contribute to the vibrancy of the local area.
MS Office has been able to read ODF files for quite a while now, so I don't understand why even people who've locked into the Microsoft Office eco system would be bothered about receiving ODF files?
Of course it could be that overly cautious IT admins might block ODF files as email attachments for feat they might be malware, and that could cause issues which just means its easier to send them in MS file formats.
It's probably a lingering effect of the delay in meaningful support. Microsoft Office has had some kind of support for ODF for a very long time, but it's only since Office 2021 that it didn't come with some footnotes like Windows only or separate conversion process. Meanwhile, Office is one of those things that people don't upgrade very often because they don't see what changes they could need, and they're usually right. The combination means that someone who wanted to use Microsoft Office might still think that ODT files would not work so well if they tried, even though it has been fine and probably would be even if they're on an earlier version.
"might block ODF files as email attachments for feat they might be malware"
Something there just doesn't ring true. Have you forgotten how much malware was spread by nasty MS Office macros and VBA?
I have been more than happy with Libreoffice for several decades and am proud to support it.
I allow ODF files, but I had to set up a VM for uesrs who need to work with blatantly unsecure government documents.
I have one gov department that insists I use an Excel file with macros to submit reports. Won't work - we have so many layers blocking off that dangerous crap that setting up a separate VM for this was the simplest way forward. Ditto for another gov department that sends PDF registration forms that demand Javascipt for validation, and without validation they won't accept the response. We have that blocked too, so that too has now been sent to that VM.
Actually, we're in general busiy booting out Adobe. Costly, risky, and we have alternatives. Now that the fuzzies in Marketing have been given access to Canva we've been able to get them to experiment with Affinity too, and so far the results are positive :).
"If I attempt to share an ODF I get "stop that weird shit you idiot!" type responses."
How do they even notice? Apart from a few desultory "just click on OK/next/whatevs - its pretty obvious" style conversations, is it really an issue?
The biggest issue with ODF is attempting to share with people for whom a phone is the computer.
A relo. of mine once ran quite a lot of Civil Service IT and apparently the user base aren't too daft, once you wake them up.
> How do they even notice? Apart from a few desultory "just click on OK/next/whatevs - its pretty obvious" style conversations, is it really an issue?
We shouldn't understate how much of a block in user flow the "wtf is this, we'll do our best" dialogs are in practice
LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc., do not and probably never will have versions which will run on iDevices. I suspect a GPL or similar issue.
MS Office for iDevices will, in theory, open ODF documents. Actual experiments, including less than five minutes ago, indicate that there are… issues. I just attempted to open three different ODF format documents (one each in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word) and was informed that the documents can’t be opened because they are corrupted. The same documents open just fine in MS Office. When I first made the attempt, the documents were on a ‘personal’ OneDrive. Putting them on a ‘business’ OneDrive, on an Apple iCloud drive, and on a GoogleDrive made no difference. Storing the files on the local volume of the iPad being used for experimentation also made no difference. Trying a different iPad made no difference. They open in LibreOffice and in MS Office on Windows and Mac systems, no problems.
I suspect that MS is being MS again. My only question is whether it’s deliberate monkeying around, despite the existence of pages such as https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-opendocument-format-odf-files-in-office-for-ipad-and-office-for-iphone-150b8e56-051a-47de-bf58-1bbf828893fa which indicates that MS Office _should_ be able to open ODF files on iDevices, or just the usual MS incompetence showing up again, and that it's supposed to work but is just broken.
In the meantime there ain't no LO or OO on iDevices and almost certainly never will be, so... don't send ODF files to anyone who might read them on an iDevice.
I don't have an Android system handy to test. I bet that MS Office on Android won't work either. I have no idea if there are LO/OO versions for Android available.
Note that MS Office on iDevices will open PDFs, no problems, and will even handle older formats, such as .DOC and .RTF, again without problems.
What?
LibreOffice for Macs is absolutely available.
You can even pay £9 to get it from Apple's app store.
As for iPads, there's Collabora Office. Their Android version is fine.
I have been using LO on Macs for a Very Long Time, so I know that it’s there. It’s not there for iPad/iPhone, a.k.a. iDevices.
Collabra is not LO, and has... issues. Out of the box it doesn't talk to OneDrive, for instance. It talks to iCloud, GoogleDrive, and DropBox out of the box, so I'd say that not talking to OneDrive is deliberate. I have a significant number of files in various OneDrives. And, again, it's not LO. There is no LO for iOS/iPadOS. There is a viewer, with 'experimental' writing ability, for Android, but not for iOS/iPadOS.
"I suspect that MS is being MS again."
It used to be that a LibreOffice Calc file opened in Excel would contain only the values in the cells, not the formulas. Yet LibreOffice Calc could (at the same time) read and write Excel files just fine.
So yes, probably just MS being MS. "See, their stuff isn't compatible!" (Yes, it is, you're choosing to make it not work.)
> If I attempt to share an ODF I get "stop that weird shit you idiot!" type responses.
But why? You give people an ODT file. It opens perfectly fine in MS Word (or, statistically speaking, as fine as Microsoft's own formats anyway). Never had any problem with it.
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I think the only major office suite that doesn't (as far as I know) have support for it is Apple iWork. That's not a big surprise since iWork is very insistent on not liking any format except its own; it'll let you export to formats that other software can read, but it does make sure to complain about it if you routinely use it. When I used it, DOCX and XLSX were supported formats, but ODT and ODS were not.
Based on the ability of the office suites used by people who my other half exchanges documents with to read the ODF format (essentially, zero) I wouldn't be so sure about claiming success. Yes I've heard that in theory Office can read the things, but in practice all that happens is complaints about unreadable documents.
You must be new here.
You need to parse those claims like a Vulture. The ability to read and write the format is apt to mean read and write a subset of the whole thing, and full of layout bugs at that - and preferably to crash when an unfamiliar feature is encountered. They seldom claim to strive for 100% of the specification with 100% accuracy and stability.
.ODF is great. But the side effect of pushing MS into a (more) open format was very important!
Typical task: OK, I've created the procedure as document for a customer. Now that document must by "anonymized" to be used for for by coworkers the next installations with other customers. Easy for text, not well done for pictures in both offices...
In both formats I can: Unpack the .DOCX/.ODT, mass edit the pictures with grey boxes, put the pictures back into the "ZIP" file, done. Sometimes I mass search replace in those .XML files as well, or check for normally invisible data containing customer references. Then drag and drop the modified data back into the ".ZIP". Works.
It also helps, in both offices, to fix some weird bugs when the programs fail to open the document, or salvage enough to make the new one in less time.
And, as the maintainer of one of the many libraries that works with the formats, I can confirm how important it is that the specification is poor.
Unfortunately, whilst the ISO specification for OOXML is maintained, there is apparently little interest in doing the same for ODF.
Please. It’s not Trumpistan, it’s the Yuge, Nothing is Greater, Orange Not-Free-At-All State. (Until Canada and Greenland are conquered, That’ll be Greater Yet.)
I’m waiting for the proclamation that Afrikaans is the Official Language. And learning Xhosa. Bazingele phantsi!
Most of the standards they touch becomes an academic exercise at best. Too many "standardization" orgs and you have the same problem of commercial proprietay formats. And de-fact standards often has broad acceptance that these "design-by-committe" ones - especially when no ones cares to enforce them.
Most likely because there's an infinite variety of flavours of Markdown, none of which are compatible.
The compatible subset is basically UTF-8, headline, bold and italic. Usually one layer of bullet points, but even that is pushing it.
The IETF have even gone so far as to say "there is no such thing as "invalid" Markdown". So in many ways it's worse than early Word.
that LO could open more Microsoft Document formats than any particular version of Microsoft Office. Probably true and smile worthy. :)
On the rare occasions that I had to send a WP rather than plain text document I have found the Office 97 .doc format had always worked (probably still does.)
Likewise for spreadsheet data if the recipient is sufficiently clueless to be unable to import CSV into Excel. I would be extracting data from various sources - databases, logs etc etc and producing CSV for the pointy-headed.
(FWIW: CSV is a pretty crappy and non standardized form and I usually produce a '|' separated format before quoting strings etc and replacing with ',' - must be extra fun in locales with ',' decimal point.)
The other half became so exasperated by Office when she upgraded from 97 that I installed LO which suited her better but I had continuing grief when the wrong Office (actually she said "wrong Windows†") opened on a document.
I fiddled with file associations for ages until the penny dropped - just remove MS Office - worked a treat. (With the instruction *always* save the document you are sending in 97 format after some prat have her grief over an odf document.)
† has there ever been a "right" one? I can see working on a helpdesk supporting MS crap could have its challenges.
You need to be careful when using the legacy Excel format. It has a 2^16 limit on it's row count, and any more than 65,536 will be dropped in the bit bucket.
Remember the scandal when thousands of people were lost from a Covid related spreadsheet? I recall seeing that magic number in the reports.
Gates understood that he who controls the file format control the customer base.
Once you realise this the MS f**king about with file formats becomes obvious.
I'm glad that ODF exists and that there is an off-ramp if governments and large organisations want to free them selves from paying the microsoft tax.
"Microsoft added these Office Open XML formats to the Office suite and submitted them to the Ecma International standards organization, which ratified them. "
Did you know even look to see how Microsoft got their file format accepted in the standards orgs? It was all over the press back then where they were paying business partners to join the ISO, gave them documents on how to respond to questions and what comments to make. The literally funded the ballot stuffing to get their document format "accepted" as an industry standard format. It was so flooded with MS shills that after the MS OOXML format was accepted, those MS shills no longer were active in the committees they joined and the org almost shut down because they no longer could get quorums to hold votes on any other proposals.
Sorry that that was quite the half-arsed article to have completely skipped why ODF hasn't gone anywhere. And it all started in Massachusetts and included Microsoft paying for members of the MA Senate to fly to Redmond and join the collective. No doubt walking out with pockets full of promises and green backs. It was MS doing what MS does to stop things which threatened their monopoly.
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Where, exactly, did you think HTML came from?
SGML is not a standard, it's a standard for defining markup languages*
*Originally developed by IBM to support the layout of its (copious) collection of manuals and AIUI under development from the 360 days (if I'm reading The Mythical Man-Month correctly)
I seem to remember the whole standards things was a bit more interesting than that.
The way i remember it was that MS tried to force the standard ratification through by putting ringers on the standards board, because basically the MS doc "standard" still had a lot of proprietary stuff in it which made it difficult for 3rd parties to write and parse.
However speaking to an XML expert at the time who was designing a large system to create a UK legislative website, the response was it was better than nothing, and a huge improvement over the binary only alternative.
However let us not forget that without the threat of ODF and the risk of major customers switching, MS would never of done this, so if nothing else we should thank ODF
I worked in Sun Microsystems Corporate IT 2000 to 2006 responsible for creating the iWork (Work From Home after Apple knocked on their door and said we own that trademark now) to send out the software for VPN, dialers, AV and firewall to send out to the 20000 Windows laptop users that Scott REALLY hated paying for to Bill. The beef was personal. I asked if we could have 1 Windows Server to help manage things somehow and was rejected every time.
"At the time, some reports joked that the deal cost less than kitting out Sun staff with Microsoft Office licenses, though the real motive was likely strategic as much as financial."
So yeah, that statement tracks. Many more horror stories so thanks for brining them up in my head. RIP Sun, it was fun while it lasted.
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