In Office 2007 (and the compatibilty pack provided for Office 2003), the only OOXML was essentially the pre-ISO ECMA version, essentially what later became defined as Transitional OOXML. In Office 2010, Transitional OOXML is produced and consumed. Strict OOXML (they are both official ISO OOXML, don't play word games), is consumed by Office 2010 but not produced.
The forthcoming release of Office 2013 will produce either and consume both. For example, the Save As ... dialog in Excel 2013 (Preview) has, among many others, these three options: Excel Workbook (*.xlsx) Strict Open XML Spreadsheet (*.xlsx) OpenDocument Spreadsheet (*.ods) And in Europe at least, the OpenDocument formats can be made the default. You'll also find that Office 2013 supports ODF 1.2 rather than ODF 1.1. I suspect that the greatest impact will be from the improved interoperability between Excel and Calc based on the ODF OpenFormula. I have no calibration on the quality of all of that standardized-format support and the quality of conversions in any direction by any producer (Microsoft Office or OpenOffice lineage). I am confident there are discrepancies and deviations on all sides. I do know that the ability to produce as well as consume OOXML is a differentiator for LibreOffice and that some people who would like to use Apache OpenOffice are unable to because of that feature disparity. It is my considered opinion that a continued asymmetry in format interchange is unsustainable. I predict that symmetric support will win out. Sooner is better than later. I have no skin in this game. I shall nevertheless observe how the situation evolves with considerable interest. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Hagar Delest [mailto:hagar.del...@laposte.net] Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 14:00 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: Is there consensus on latest MS Office formats? Hello all, I'm back on the dev mailing list because there are some interesting topics sometimes. But no further involvement in the AOO project anymore. Before AOO starts to try such OOXML filter, I think it would be interesting to have a global consensus about what is intended about OOXML. The OOXML compatibility was a rather frequent question in the Google Moderator session, same in the forums. If AOO offers the possibility to save in OOXML, what is the future of ODF then? Why users should bother with a still rather unknown format if they can save in OOXML for compatibility with MS Office users? So what is exactly the rationale to implement the export filter? Do we really want to go this way and then handle the users ranting because of the glitches of such a format? I guess that it is still easy to get a pirated copy of MS Office nowadays. So if someone wants MSO for free, this should not really be a big deal (and MS would certainly let it be so that its OOXML still expands). And the numbers show that AOO has not lost its leverage compared to LibreOffice for example (the only other to propose the OOXML export filter). So the sub-question is: do really our users need that OOXML export filter? This is a political question. The previous OOo team took a decision. What is the AOO team position on that now? This could have long term consequences. And by the way, what flavor of the OOXML would be supported? Transient or ISO? Hagar Le 08/01/2013 22:17, Andrea Pescetti a écrit : > On 07/01/2013 Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote: >> I can read these formats in AOO, but I cannot write them. Although I >> remember seeing discussion on this, my current understanding is that >> there are no current plans to add this capability into AOO, is this >> correct? (or did I totally miss something and it is currently available). > > I've heard for a long time (since version 3.3, and perhaps earlier) that > OpenOffice does contain OOXML-writing code, but that it is commented out (not > simply disabled at build time). Is this correct? > > If the code indeed exists and can be compiled, maybe we could start by > compiling it and doing some tests to see how (in)complete it is... > > Regards, > Andrea.
