LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

The Document Foundation has taken a swing at Euro-Office, accusing the self-described sovereign productivity suite of doing Microsoft's content lock-in strategy a favor while wrapping itself in the language of European digital independence. The attack came from Italo Vignoli, a founding member of The Document Foundation, who …

[b1k3rdude]

Thats fine, but libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Zawinski’s Law - surely git commandline can read mail by now ?

[Paul Herber]

"... surely git commandline can read mail by now ..."

it's in systemd, so ...

[Eric 9001]

`git send-email` sends email and `git am` is used to apply patches from an email inbox in mbox format.

Libreoffice can kind of display .eml files, so it can real email.

[Headley_Grange]

"Thats fine, but libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook.."

You make that sound like a bad thing.

[Doctor Syntax]

libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.

It's debatable as to whether this is the best approach (after all, it enables people like yourself to make comments like that) but AIUI their position is that it enables users to make a choice. There was some discussion about taking Thunderbird under their wing when its position under Mozilla looked shaky. Personally I wish they'd taken over SeaMonkey and wrapped in an entire browser/email/RSS readerUsenet reader/calendar package.

As it is, users can add TBird or something else as they choose.

[Like a badger]

Most home users are not like us, they don't want to cobble together a collection of different apps. I'd say enterprise IT architects even less so. To be a viable MS Office competitor, WhateverOffice needs to have fully integrated email, instant messaging, video call and conference, and collaboration tools. Without integrated capabilities that match Team, Outlook and SharePoint (and like it or not, AI assistance).The "new, sovereign" suites are going nowhere.without those.

Put simply, FOSS enterprise office advocates needs to accept that (whether you or i think it a bad thing or not) most organisations use Teams, Outlook and SharePoint all day every day, and they are not going to let those toys be taken away.

If European governments want things to be different, they need to start funding their own version of the Mozilla Foundation, and be willing to additionally fund bolt on acquisitions for key capabilities, including buying private IP and open sourcing it. This could be achieved at the cost of a rounding error on the 5 trillion per year spent on welfare across Europe, but it won't be. Like everything European, nobody would agree on it, nobody would want to pay for it, every nation would play for purely home country advantage, the foundation leadership would be the usual talentless Eurocrats (is Ursula looking for a new Euro-gig yet?), the French will throw their weight around and then storm out of the project in a hissy fit). We all know this COULD happen, we all know it WON'T happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is false. Home users cobble together everything. Often because they don't know any better.

But, an email client isn't a necessary compliment to document applications, and most people usea seen based mail interface, which is simpler and more widely used than rich clients even if we regard it as inferior.

[Charlie Clark]

Hm, I don't think home users really need more than e-mail (probably browser based), chat (all messengers are more common than teams), some word processor and possibly a spreadsheet.

Business users care most about "groupware", which is essentially integrated e-mail and calendar functionality, which is where Microsoft probably still has the edge. They're used to at least two different conference systems: Zoom, Google, Teams, etc., where interoperability is necessarily limited. I agree that integrated software is important to them, which is what we're increasingly seeing with this and other projects.

[Like a badger]

If it were as simple as groupware being Teams and Outlook, then why would huge numbers of companies splash out on 200 anythings a year per user on a full Office licence?

Groupware includes adequate integration across all "productivity" apps. Negotiating a deal with an MS reseller for Outlook for emails and calendar, then with Zoom for conferencing and calling, and then bolting on Open Office and additionally OpenCloud? You can probably find somebody who does it, but every single large business (and now government department) I've worked for or had any business dealings with has used a full on Microsoft desktop. Lots of times the businesses I have worked for have been through cycles of "oh oh god we need to cut our costs!", but NEVER have I seen the idea even floated of kicking Microsoft off the desktop and using FOSS. It just doesn't happen, users are broadly happy with what they've got, the IT team are happy for them to have that. FOSS is undoubtedly embedded in the full enterprise software stack, but to conquer the desktop, Open/Libre or others need a full-on integrated pack of desktop products that both do everything MS desktop software does, and does it at least as well (hence my comments about what Europe would need to do to make that happen).

[Esso]

Descartes before the horse

As well, how many engineers (desktop to app to backend) out there are as well versed as the majority of MS helpers?

Are universities pushing FOSS helpdesk?

[Doctor Syntax]

"If it were as simple as groupware being Teams and Outlook, then why would huge numbers of companies splash out on 200 anythings a year per user on a full Office licence?"

Lock in and believing the salesman. Not necessarily in that order.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Most home users are not like us, they don't want to cobble together a collection of different apps."

My friends who've been forced to my new W11 laptops are not using MS Office as far as I can see. They're using either LibreOffice or one of the other free suites. Unfortunately for them Windows comes with some sort of cobbled together email client so at least some of them are using that - not necessarily happily but I'm not really doing support for them or else I'd install T-bird. I've recommended it so some of them may be using it. It's not a good situation for them. My SiL is suddenly getting messages about her storage being full. Several of them are paying for local support. As Windows isn't my thing at all I'm not getting into that so I'm quite happy to let someone have the income stream.

The president of our Civic Soc seemed so overwhelmed at a meeting on Thursday night that I made an exception and went round yesterday to show him how to embed documents in email; apart from anything else LO seems to be saving documents on OneDrive or whatever it is and they're not visible in the file managerl.

[Paul Herber]

Does Thunderbird need competition?

[Charlie Clark]

Yes.

[Richard Tobin]

It's also lacking an effective toe-nail trimmer and sink plunger.

[captain veg]

deal breaker

It's the spike for getting stones out of horses' hooves that kills it for me.

-A.

[Headley_Grange]

Re: deal breaker

My uncle told me the spike was for getting boy scouts out of girl guides. I was much too young to get the joke but when I told my teacher the same thing the look of shock on her face made me realize that there was something else going on that was beyond my understanding.

[JWLong]

It's also lacking an effective toe-nail trimmer and sink plunger.

When are they going to integrate "the poopscoop function".

I mean really, how could it be a true OutHouse(OutLook) replacement without being able to shit all over itself(with or without the help of AI!).

/s

[Esso]

Re: It's also lacking an effective toe-nail trimmer and sink plunger.

I've a new sign to design!

[captain veg]

or

> libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.

So glad you made the distinction between Outlook and an email client.

It's debatable whether an office suite needs an email client any more than, say, an RSS reader or even an integrated web browser. A stronger case can be made for an Exchange client. Evolution makes a fair stab at that.

-A.

[doublelayer]

Re: or

It depends what shared features it's supposed to have. I think the history has shown that email and calendars make sense to go together, but email and office suites don't have as much overlap. If that's a conscious choice, keeping them separate would be logical.

That said, not as much doesn't mean none. The example I'd use to demonstrate this is mail merge. It makes sense to have that in a word processor where a lot of editing can be done first, but it makes sense to have access to the email client's address list, server settings, and folder rules. There's some demonstration of this in LibreOffice right now as it does have mail merge support in Writer, and because it would be painful otherwise, you can even send email from that process. If they're writing email sending code, integrating that with a mail client so you only need to write that once would be beneficial, especially if you need to support accounts with different authentication (LibreOffice doesn't support that now).

[probgoblin]

Re: or

I think, from the user's perspective, there's a very good argument to be made that your email client (that you use to communicate your work with both internal and external stakeholders) should be as similar in form and function to the productivity suite you use to create that work.

The workflow for composing and formatting an email in Outlook is close enough to creating a document in Word that (most) users don't really have to learn how to use two pieces of software. Microsoft's real value to a lot of customers isn't that their software is good (because holy shit, is is NOT), but that for most of the people you are buying seats for it's both good enough and only one (1) thing the user has to learn. I don't know how well an Office alternative will do without an Outlook analogue included.

[Joe W]

Re: or

I personally think that html in emails was a really bad idea. It serves no purpose except adding stupid formatted text and a picture to your signature block. Yes, sometimes (once a year...) I send a table inline - not as an attached file, as should be the bloody default. I also think that top-reply is stupid. The old standard was really readable when done correctly. Yeah, get off my lawn, etc. *shouts at clouds*

So I do not need any formatting in my emails. I do not think that it is a too great hurdle to learn "this button creates a new mail", and can we please talk about the menu structure in Microsoft's products? It is pretty messed up, and not at all standard from version to version. So I do absolutely not see that Microsoft makes it easy for users.

[doublelayer]

Re: or

Tables should be attachments by default because why exactly? People have computers that can write in multiple colors, with emphasis, with tables, with headers with different font sizes, and somehow we're supposed to deny them the ability to use any of these when the documents are messages sent to someone else? Should we tell websites not to support those either? If not, why should email be different? Users want to do that, there is no good reason to tell them they can't, so it was inevitable one way or another. The only thing you would have gotten if people had only permitted plain text emails is a successful Microsoft email alternative in the 1990s that could do those things which would have replaced it for most people. Ideally an open standard, but the history of Internet Explorer suggests that, though it probably would have been, it wouldn't be a nice one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: or

FYI, many organisations had to ban email "stationery because outlook did not make things better with that nonsense.

What it did make better was integrated calendaring and other enterprise features most people don't need at all..

[Blitheringeejit]

But email IS plain text...

The lovely thing about plain text is that no client-specific rendering implementation can render it illegible. In over three decades of using email, I've seen lots of attempts to implement prettifying "standards", and most of those worked pretty badly if you looked at them in any email client other than the one which created them. HTML email is just the latest - and HTML rendering in an email client is hardly likely to improve matters.

It could possibly work, if:

a) everyone starts writing W3C-compliant HTML5 (don't hold your breath), and

b) every email message includes a stylesheet which fully supports and flexes to different viewport widths, aspect ratios, and accessibility requirements.

Until there's some sign of that happening, I'm going to stick with plain text in my email, and leave HTML rendering where it belongs - in a full-fat browser, with proper control over formatting and clientside script execution. NB a browser component instantiated within an email client tab does NOT count!

And as for pasting lumps of Excelcrescence data into "emails" - don't get me started...

</rant>

TL:DR: Unicode has finally brought plain text simplicity to the wider world - try using it And if you really do want your prettified message to appear the same to all your correspondents as it does to you, create/export the bloody thing as a PDF and attach it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: But email IS plain text...

Completely agree except for your "It could work if" bit. We've seen what happens anyway. Tracking GIFs and malware links.

[doublelayer]

Re: or

The principle is correct, but I don't think you need integration or common authors to make that happen. What you need is standard user interfaces, and we mostly do have them. We used to have them even more, but designers like changing things, and when they run out of good reasons to change things, not enough of them stop. Still, the email writing window in Thunderbird still looks like most text editing controls, including the document window in LibreOffice Writer, with the same buttons and keyboard shortcuts. Options are generally in the same places, and even the menu order and organization is recognizable from those in other programs. Both of those differ more from OS to OS than they do from each other since they both follow the interface design of whichever OS/DE they're running on (some DEs don't apply because there are a lot of them). I wonder if we actually need more than that.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: or

In the Acorn world you could drag and drop almost anything from one program to another.

[Roland6]

Re: or

Wasn’t that the original objective for OOLE? Only this lead to a couple of problems: embedded objects that didn’t render on systems where the associated application/viewer wasn’t installed, and a massive security headache as scripts were being automatically executed (a problem we are now encountering again in spades with “AI”).

[doublelayer]

Re: or

Which is only useful if you can define what dragging each type of thing into each type of destination is supposed to do. If I select a chunk of audio from audio editor A and drag it into email client B, what should happen? Should A cut the chunk, put it in a file, and attach it to B? Should A attach the whole file to B? Should A be compressing either file since it's about to be emailed and the raw audio that you're storing in an editor is going to be quite large unless it's a tiny clip? But if B is something local, you probably don't need to compress it. If you assume that this is necessary for sending things*, which one needs to happen: A must know that B is an email client and implement compression, or B must know that the object from A is uncompressed audio and implement compression?

* That assumption isn't as arbitrary as the example seems. You can email uncompressed audio since it's just a file size limitation as long as your mail server doesn't have a limit. There are plenty of cases where conversion is less optional. If you want to embed an image file in a document format which doesn't support the format it's in now, either something has to convert it to a supported format, or raw pixel data is being sent and it's being separately encoded every time (a recipe for degradation.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: or

And what does the recipient's email client C do with it? Does it have something that makes sense of the audio clip? If so will it auto play? Does the recipient want to open an email and have it play audio? And what happens if somebody sends malware which appears to be an audio clip but in true Windows fashion, depends on the .exe extension being hidden from the recipient?

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: or

> The example I'd use to demonstrate this is mail merge.

Mail merge was useful way back in the mists of early internet. Then spam mail arrived and killed it. The correct tool to use these days is one of the mail services like Mailchimp who don't mind sending gazillions of emails per minute. Your average ISP would spot the mass mailer and block it, and likely send you a snotogram.

Having said that, integrating eg Mailchimp with Libre Office to create an integrated mass mailing experience is something I'd like to see.

[doublelayer]

Re: or

Not everyone wants to outsource mail delivery to another commercial service, a service that itself has been used by spammers, for something a mail server of their choice can manage. Mail merge is probably not great if you're sending a thousand messages, but a lot of people need to send messages to smaller lists, easily do so without hitting limits*, and don't see the need or value in a commercial service to do that.

* It's not the ISP anymore. The ISP has no idea how many emails I sent because the traffic over SMTP is encrypted (was that twenty emails or one with a big attachment). It's the mail system which wants to protect themselves against spammers so they don't have to wrestle with blocklists. Except if it's yours, it doesn't care, and if it's commercial, you can often prove to their satisfaction that the mail is not spam and get a relatively high limit. Not necessarily high enough that you can run a large discussion list off it, but large enough that you can send the occasional mass-mail without exceeding it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: or

"one of the mail services like Mailchimp"

You mean spammers. If i could bother to get round to it I'd put a filter on at my MSP's server to bounce anything coming from there.

[Someone Else]

Re: or

It's debatable whether an office suite needs an email client any more than, say, an RSS reader or even an integrated web browser a fish needs a bicycle.

There, FTFY.

[Paul Herber]

Re: or

" a fish needs a bicycle."

And here we with the phrase "fin de siècle" being used twice in the same day in El Reg articles.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: A stronger case can be made for an Exchange client. Evolution makes a fair stab at that.

I have used Evolution (on Linux) for Enterprise Exchange mail and it does work reasonably well - not that I liked it much… I preferred Pine :)

I think when Ximian brought out Evolution there was an Exchange-like groupware server (Insight ?) that it could work with as well as some connector to talk to Exchange. (Early 2000s I think.)

Exchange always seemed to me to be a slow motion train smash (clearly best avoided) and M365 doesn't seem to be a great improvement but having spent the last few decades avoiding both I am not exactly unprejudiced.

[Anonymous Coward]

... an equivalent to outlook?

Really, you should stop putting that shit in your coffee.

It is not sugar.

... any kind of email client?

In an office suite?

Whatever for?

.

[Anonymous Coward]

libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client

You may have missed the reference to Open Standards. ANY mail (and calendar) client will do as long as open standards such as SMTP, POP/IMAP, CALDAV and CARDDAV are provided, and there are far more email clients than there are reasonably usable Office applications.

I have been using LibreOffice and equivalents since I bought StarOffice for OS/2 (read: paid for), and it's been OK for my use ever since.

[Kraft]

Should it?

Should it? Email clients have been dematerialized since ages. Who needs on prem outlook when all services are moving or have moved to the cloud. Even MS is silently setting the stage to oblige their customers to accept the move.

If you do need an Outlook alternative, try Evolution: https://help.gnome.org/evolution/

[Roland6]

Re: Should it?

>” Who needs on prem outlook when all services are moving or have moved to the cloud.”?

Email has always been “in the cloud”, the question is whether you had a local/off-line message store that was accessible anytime, anyplace, anywhere and thus did not permanently need an internet connection to be accessible.

MS are setting the stage where they can fine grade charge for their applications, just like some others are already doing. It irritates me in the extreme when you have a seemingly full feature application only to discover at the point where you actually need some function it’s a cost extra (*).

(*) adding to the irritation is the “n free days/uses” option, so for the first one or two times the functionality all works, so you think you have a fully working package, only to go over the threshold…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Who needs on prem outlook when all services are moving or have moved to the cloud

Speak for yourself. There are many of us who avoid a few things in IT

That list includes:-

- AI

- The Cloud

- Anything from Microslop, google and friends.

Around here, you have to make a really good case to use any of those items. Our initial answer is a firm No and for the last 18 months or so, we have not said 'Yes'.

[Steve Davies 3]

Why?

Why would anyone want an equivalent to the POS that is LookOut is beyond me. for starters, it is produced by Microslop.

I use Thunderbird as my email client and have done since around 2007.

Why do you need an email client as part of a Word Processor, Spreadsheet etc package? Just because MS bundled it as part of Orifice does not mean that it is a good idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why?

"I use Thunderbird as my email client and have done since around 2007."

I use David Harris' Pegasus Mail from way back when my box ran on W3.10/WFW3.11, through to MS XPSP3.

Never liked or used webmail save when I had no choice.

Being able to run Pegasus Mail in a Linux box via WINE was the deal-breaker allowing me to leave the MS ecosystem for good.

If my memory serves me right, that means over 30 years or continuous use.

Absolutely no complaints whatsoever.

Rock solid, any issues I may have had were 100% certified PEBCAK.

Outlook?

Never went near that crap.

.

[Eric 9001]

It's feature creep for an office suite to have an email client.

There exists plenty of free software email clients to choose from, as per user preference.

Even if you require something that supports "outlook 365 [down]" proprietary-mail, evolution with evolution-ews is a free replacement that is functionally vastly superior (really painful to setup and you may need admin approval to allow "3rd party clients", due to sabotage by m$).

[dmesg]

Itrelevant

Irrelevant. The LibreOffice objection, and the article, are about the choice of default file format in a word processor (and presumably spreadsheet, and possibly presentation thing).

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Splitters ....

How untypical of an open source project to attempt to torpedo a useful imitative over a purity test.

Anyway, what can you expect from a project that uses $GUI_TOOLKIT/$BUILD_SYSTEM/$SOURCE_CONTROL that is different from the correct one I use

[Joe W]

Re: Splitters ....

I think the caffeine deficient crowd needs their sarcasm detectors fixed... Yes, it is "a good thing"[TM] to add the de-facto standard "/s"-marker, no, I do not believe it is neccessary everywhere. About that way to indicate sarcasm, I would like to propose a new and interoperable standard that does not rely on the slash as a format indicator. I think it is incredibly crude to use such a vernacular term...

/s

[Eric 9001]

Re: Splitters ....

A project regarding itself as "open source", rather than being free software, that is for the users freedom, fails my purity test (such projects almost always end up being proprietary software on further inspection).

I will gladly send as many torpedo's as needed.

[TVU]

I think that comment is bit strong particularly since Euro-Office is aimed at getting people to actually move away from Microsoft's products.

[doublelayer]

I think they're expecting competition for users from governments and other organizations interested in sovereignty (for whichever definition of sovereignty each is using) and proposed funding to projects used in those areas. I think that's more likely the reason for the disagreement than the default file format, since both pieces of software support both formats and governments could easily standardize on EuroOffice+ODT or LibreOffice+Docx if they felt like using something other than the defaults.

If this is correct, I have more sympathy for LibreOffice and its contributors. Even though I think this argument is mostly spurious, they have been building this software for a long time, producing a useful and maintained product, whereas EuroOffice is a fork of something written by somebody else with no proven interest or ability to do something of use with it. I think EuroOffice's creation was a plan to pitch themselves as the sovereign choice to get funding, whether they would then use that funding well or not.

[TVU]

I could understand their comment more if EuroOffice had been directly based off LibreOffice but that isn't the case.

[doublelayer]

True, it's a fork of OnlyOffice. However, it was me, not LibreOffice, who expressed misgivings about that. I wouldn't have those misgivings if this was LibreOffice and OnlyOffice competing for the support. I haven't used OnlyOffice so I don't know what assets it might have, but one thing it has demonstrated is that it, like LibreOffice, has maintainers who are interested in making a working program. Euro-Office has only demonstrated the abilities to fork and change names, in my opinion out of a cynical desire for funding of work they haven't done, so without that proven maintenance, I rank it lower.

[ensko]

Strictly speaking true, but behind Euro-Office is, among others, Nextcloud, and they have integrated OnlyOffice for a while. among the reasons[1] for forking were that "Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged. ONLYOFFICE typically does not review or accept pull requests." I read that as: we're capable of developing this further, we're willing to do it, but were not allowed.

To me the motivation looks more like: there is an office suite we want to integrate further, but we're limited by the maintainers. So we forked. That doesn't give them a clear maintenance record, but to me it also doesn't look like (exclusively) a funding-based decision.

[1] https://github.com/Euro-Office/#euro-office-liberates-the-onlyoffice-code-base

[doublelayer]

I hope you're right. I certainly don't know enough to say that Euro-Office won't continue to develop it. I have seen far more people happily announce that they've forked something who then didn't do much to maintain it that I am wary of new forks until they've got enough history that I can see they're going somewhere.

[Doctor Syntax]

"I think EuroOffice's creation was a plan to pitch themselves as the sovereign choice to get funding, whether they would then use that funding well or not."

Liam has documented various manoeuvrings in the last few months around office shites, such as LO reviving their own cloud-based version which had been shelved (sent to the attic in their terminology) in favour of Collabora's version.

Everyone who's been paying attention can see that the sovereignty movement is resulting in opportunities for office suites and they all want to grab a share - or, more likely, I suspect, the entire thing. A share would be fine is the products are to be in ODF and hence interchangeable. Somebody grabbing the whole market would a frying pan into fire move.

[Charlie Clark]

I think it's missing the point: OnlyOffice is probably the closest open source alternative to MS Office and has always used OOXML for its files. This is sort of proof that, flawed as it is, OOXML is good enough for interoperability. Waiting for ODF to be reliably implemented would simply delay things and would only really benefit Microsoft.

I think criticisms of the fork are more important.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>Waiting for ODF to be reliably implemented would simply delay things and would only really benefit Microsoft.

So expect a call for an independent Euro-Standard office document format, to be decided by a committee to be formed after the committee to determine the members of the committee has had it's terms of reference approved by the committee to determine ..

[DrewPH]

There's an XKCD...

[Charlie Clark]

Possibly, though I think the companies around NextCloud and Open XChange have moved on from the fundamental opposition to Microsoft – not the best way to win paying customers – onto more pragramatic solutions. OnlyOffice doesn't come with a mail client or calendar, so I wonder what they're using for those, presumably the web versions which are pretty meh to be honest.

[Roland6]

> Waiting for ODF to be reliably implemented would simply delay things and would only really benefit Microsoft.

The ODF Standard is managed by OASIS, with ODF 1.2 (2011) was ratified as ISO/IEC 26300-1:2015, and is currently being updated with ODF 1.3 (2021) due to become 26300-3:20nn, and at some point will be revised again to take account of ODF 1.4 (2025) There is also the OASIS ODF Feature Compliance Suites.

So the wait for ODF to be reliably implemented seems to be more about updating OnlyOffice than the absence of compliant implementations, given LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Office, Calligra Suite and MS Office are ODF 1.2 compliant (*)..

(*) Not found any explicit announcements in the various release notes for more recent revisions, except LibreOffice which does support 1.3 and has budget for 1.4 compliance work since 2024…

[Eric 9001]

m$ office is not ODF compliant - ODF documents often fail to render correctly or at all - as m$ knows that documents failing to render correctly will always be blamed on ODF, not office.

[dmesg]

OOXML, the unstandard

If I recall correctly (from the days when Groklaw was my first news stop), when OOXML was first approved as a standard MS Office was *not* compliant. The committee found that parts of Microsoft's proposal needed work and changed the draft MS provided.

I also recall that there was considerable pushback and skullduggery from MS against any changes, including installing a MS-friendly operative as chair of the committee, who, once the standard was approved, set about quietly tinkering with it over the next few years to re-align it to MS's wishes.

Finally, iirc, the standard specified some behavior as "what MS {product} does in this situation". That's a quote from an old memory, but Groklaw had the exact quote, and the wording had precisely that meaning and directness. Due to time pressure and MS not actually having a written spec of product behavior in some cases (!), the wording actually made it into portions of the approved spec.

If anybody can bring me up to date on the situation, I'd appreciate it. But unless something has substantially changed, OOXML is a spec in name but not fact.

[Eric 9001]

Re: OOXML, the unstandard

The situation hasn't changed since the start - while microsoft may have made some slight revisions to the documents, that made no practical difference, as software following it cannot read MOX documents.

You're probably thinking of things like;

https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_autoSpaceLikeWord95_topic_ID0EWPBZ.html

https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/Part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_footnoteLayoutLikeWW_topic_ID0EXUJZ.html

https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/Part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_lineWrapLikeWord6_topic_ID0EZDLZ.html

https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/Part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_shapeLayoutLikeWW8_topic_ID0ES1NZ.html

It seriously has written; "To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard" - microsoft of course is fully capable of stating what the rules are (they have the software, they have their documentation and they have the source code).

There is also; https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/Part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_truncateFontHeightsL_topic_ID0E1QRZ.html which has the same claim, but that seems actually possible to implement well enough, as there's an example photo to duplicate.

I haven't looked further, but I would expect hundreds of such intentional omissions.

[Anonymous Coward]

It clearly isn't, if it's using msooxml by default

[Lowres]

Docx and xlsx is fine, I can understand the choice (if there was a choice). Different office tool + a bunch of different file extensions would freak-out the horde of MS addicts.

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't. You don't seem to realise but msooxml is a moving target, and it's proprietary, and it can contains things no non-microsoft application can read.

[Eric 9001]

m$ office still doesn't implement "OOXML" to specification (it's impossible for anyone else but m$ anyway - for example it has stuff like; https://c-rex.net/samples/ooxml/e1/part4/OOXML_P4_DOCX_autoSpaceLikeWord95_topic_ID0EWPBZ.html which says to use word 95 spacing, but does not document the spacing rules).

The format m$ office uses is Microsoft Office XML (MOX), which is proprietary and is changed every time libreoffice goes and reverse engineers the latest sabotage (for example, libreoffice supports parsing XML-encoded C struct, which is needed to support the typical m$ development practice of dumping the memory of the data structure that encodes the data into the file).

"OOXML" is the result of m$ grabbing their internal documentation (that they don't follow anyway), removing the important information and then dumping the remaining over 6000 pages and calling it a "standard" and then got ECMA to rubber stamp it as a "standard" (even though something impossible to implement even after following 6000 pages is not a standard and will never be).

m$ definitely didn't corrupt the voting process by instructing their serfs to vote yes in exchange for "marketing contribution" and "extra support in the form av Microsoft resources"; https://web.archive.org/web/20101103064049/http://www.os2world.com/content/view/14871/79/

[Doctor Syntax]

Microsoft had a long history of making new versions of Office that produced documents that previous versions couldn't open. They only came up with OOXML and a tame ISO committee whenthey were cornered by US procurement requirements saying office S/W must follow an allegedly open standard. About the same time as they produced something that made a relatively fixed target for others to implement they then changed the UI. Existing users had to adapt but it then meant that new users trained on the new UI (say with educational licences) found the older, saner and also standards-based (even if it was an IBM standard originally) UI of LO to be difficult. Odd, that timing, don't you think?

[MrRtd]

Considering almost all existing documents are probably in Microsoft's formats, immediately switching the default would cause massive headaches due to compatibility. I think the criticism is a bit misplaced.

[tfewster]

Agreed - Especially as you're migrating users, it simplifies compatibility with unmigrated colleagues. (Yes, I know LibreOfffice is pretty good at reading OOXML, and MS Office can read Open formats)

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nonsense, were talking about the default output format. The preferred way to wean someone off of something is to have new data in the open format, and be able to read the proprietary format, not the other way around.

Defaults matter.

[NetMage]

So every time they try to communicate with the immigrated users they have to do something special? That’s a recipe for migration failure.

[Doctor Syntax]

If the EU and EU countries* are serious about sovereignty they'll be mandating genuine open standards. In that case anyone wanting to use some other document format will be the ones out of step and it will be they who have to solve their own problems. Existing material will be seen as "legacy" with all the opprobrium that implies.

* 'd like to include the UK as well but getting any sense from any possible government is going to be impossible for years.

[Greg 38]

Default or not, as long as ODF documents can be read by the EuroOffice software suite, does it matter? The fact of life in 2026 is that a large portion of the world uses the Microsoft XML format, so it is natural that it be the default format. That default can always be changed later.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is painfully naive.

[Roland6]

The issue I suggest is slightly different. ODF should have been the default for government MS Office deployments since circa 2006 when the ODF add-in for Office 2003 became available. The need is to ensure EuroOffice can read Microsoft XML and in the vast majority of cases save it as ODF without the user getting a “loss of detail” warning. Excel’s seeming default “loss of detail” warning when trying to save even a blank spreadsheet to ODF instead of .xlsx is part of the end user perception problem(*).

(*) A problem I had with Office 2019 was for reasons unknown Excel would decide it could not save a document as ODF only .xlsx, a problem resolved by a repair reinstall until the next couple of updates corrupted things again.(**)

(**) Currently having similar problems with the default Windows 10/11 drivers for a Brother printer, which initially work then fail deciding to format everything as A5 even though the printer is reporting A4 paper. Resolved by uninstalling the Windows (MOPRIA) drivers and installing the Brother printer specific drivers…

[Blitheringeejit]

Resolved for the moment, but...

...then broken again when the next Windows update reinstalls the Windows drivers and changes your default printer to use that driver.

Been there, done that, rent the garment...

[Eric 9001]

ODF practically cannot be used with m$ office, as the implementation of the standard is intentionally wrong (see "loss of detail warning").

The issues may be possible to ignore for simple documents of little importance, but not for important documents.

(There's a double standard for proprietary software and free software - it's acceptable for proprietary software that costs a fortune, to always be screwing up and corrupting important documents, but it's unacceptable if an old version of free software, that is gratis, has ever corrupted documents).

Therefore, it couldn't have been the default, unless the goal is to encourage use of libreoffice, by making document handling unfeasible without using libreoffice.

[Doctor Syntax]

With ODF and non-MS applications as standard any S/W using non-standard formats or having an issue with standard formats will be that S/W's vendor's and users' problem.

[Taliesinawen]

Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML)

Microsoft “Office Open XML” (OOXML) format. Not to be confused with “Open Document Format” (ODF).

iirc: Despite Ms claiming to publishing the OOXML full specs, opening the document in OpenOffice and then OOXML renders the doc incorrectly. Because certain legacy Windows structures are embedded in the docx.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML)

OpenOffice is likely rendering the document correctly, as it's rendering it to the specification.

What m$ has provided is an incorrectly encoded file.

[_wojtek]

defaults matter...

setting default to actually open and interoperable standard would further push it's adoption. MS supposedly already supports it then what's the problem?

some (in this thread) complain that would cause adoption issues - guess what - it would be mostly first in public institutions (and somewhat forced) so it's a non issue...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: defaults matter...

"what's the problem?"

If their is one experienced by non-standard, legacy S/W then it's the vendor's problem to address or not as they choose.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um where do I down load this client? Am I missing something?

I cant find anything to download to run on my desktop, just docker containers, fronted clients etc, Where can I get my eurooffice.exe client?

Or do we need to compile from source every install?

Where is the big button which says download any try, its free?

Now I need to spin up a docker container for my mother to use it?

Is it web only?

https://github.com/Euro-Office/

There is no way Queen Ursula is downloading and compiling this.

ffs what kind of release news is this?

Maybe I did not search Google enough.... oh wait it says that OnlyOffice was originally developed in Russia ... mmm

[Eric 9001]

Re: Um where do I down load this client? Am I missing something?

There isn't a real client - it's server SaaSS - it can't be used without a resource-intensive docker container running on some computer.

The only claimed benefit of OnlyOffice over LibreOffice seems to be claimed slightly better MOX (Microsoft Office XML) support, but I suspect the improved support relies on proprietary software from microsoft, that runs on their servers.

Use Libreoffice instead - each time microsoft sabotages MOX further, Libreoffice developers get reverse engineering - currently LibreOffice has better support for MOX than old versions of office and it's only getting better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah ok clarity ....

"Euro-Office is not designed for stand-alone use, but developed to be a web based and integrated in another product that handles documents, for example a file sharing solution, an online wiki, a project management tool and so on."

So this is not a substitute for Office 365 Suite, its just a substitute for Office 365 Web stuff?

Balls!

So Libreoffice is still the best choice for um-connected shopping lists and love letters.

[Pete Sdev]

Hmmmm

To be honest, it's probably fairly pragmatic at this point in time to default to the MS format.

Otherwise, end-users, who neither know nor care about technica such as document file formats, are likely to get in tizzy as soon as they try to share a document outside their organisation and the recipient can't open it. (or can MS Office properly read ODF documents these days? It's been thankful decades since I've used it)

Euro-Office needs to support the ODF formats in full pretty damm sharp (I've the impression it can read by not write, though I may be wrong on this). Then on first use ask the user for their preferred default format (which may be predetermined by an appropriate admin config).

Looking at OnlyOffice, I can well understand why people have forked it. It's also a different use-case than LibreOffice.

LibreOffice does have a perfectly valid point about file formats and the question of control.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Hmmmm

But will Euro-Office be able to open MS Office documents and format them in the same way? Best to treat all the MS file format stuff as legacy - do the best you can and that's all.

[NetMage]

Given that Euro-office is OnlyOffice Desktop is essentially an Electron wrapper around the web version, this is doomed anyway. Even Microsoft has admitted that web everywhere is a recipe for slow applications that everyone complains about.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, hardware will catch up with the software requirements. This is just the EU being forward looking you know something that the UK government should try.

Give it 10 years, those web apps will run like Office 95 did in the 2000's.

Whether we will ever be able to afford something to run Euro Office in future, that s a different issue. Hence the need for the cloud/server part. Whether its a US company or a EU/UK company, you will pay slave.

[Eric 9001]

Every time hardware gets twice as fast, web cr…apps and other proprietary malware finds a way to run 2.5x as slow.

Give it 10 years, those web cr…apps will run even slower than Office 95 in the 2000's.

I've determined that the start menu of Windows ME on a pentium III laptop with 128MB RAM is more responsive than the start menu of Windows 11 on an exponentially faster computer with exponentially more RAM - although office 95 word ran like garbage, just like word today.

[Stephen Leibowitz]

UK government and others should update their ODF support to version 1.4

ODF 1.4 is a substantial improvement over version 1.2. It is a stronger competitor to OOXML. There are users and software products that do not support ODF 1.4, but support earlier versions. I think the Open Document Format would be more popular if they would also support 1.4.

The UK government created a stir in 2014 when it mandated ODF for “sharing or collaborating with government documents.” The mandate specifically requires version 1.2, which was current at the time. ODF 1.4 documents are still not acceptable. Yet software that supports 1.4 can also import documents in earlier ODF versions, including 1.2.

Google came out with support for ODF 1.2 shortly after the UK mandated it. Google has not added support for 1.4. Also, the ODF Validator shows there is room for improvement when Google Docs saves files in ODF 1.2 format.

LibreOffice can open, edit, and save all versions of ODF. Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office 2024 default to OOXML, but also support ODF 1.4.