Groklaw - ODF Alliance Tests Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 ODF Support - Finds Serious Shortcomings

[Evan Leibovitch]

James Knott wrote:
> Here's an interesting article about Microsoft ODF support.
>
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009051922175320
>
>   
Part of the problem is that ODF left certain parts of the format
unspecified and Microsoft exploited that deficiency. Apparently there is
no formal ODF spec for spreadsheet formulas, which frankly to me seems
like a very serious flaw. Microsoft is able to produce an ODF
spreadsheet that is completely incompatible with, say, OpenOffice Calc,
while still maintaining  compliance with the spec.

IOW, interoperability in theory but not practice. Some observers suggest
that this is just standard practice for Microsoft, which essentially did
the same thing with POSIX a decade or two ago.

However, arguably Microsoft has a point in asserting that the ODF spec
has flaws, and its exploitation of the flaws appears to be solid
evidence. It is not completely true that the current problems indicate a
lack of MS support for ODF. What MS is not supporting are the
non-standard implementations -- for things like spreadsheet formulas --
found in OpenOffice and other apps. In this case the Excel extensions of
the spec are no less "legitimate" than the OOoCalc extensions.

Having said that, there are far more vendor-specific flaws in OOXML --
but that's not what's at issue here.

- Evan

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