Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org

silentbob4 writes "Hot on the heels of yesterdays interview of Sun's Florian Reuter posted on Slashdot comes a two page interview with OpenOffice.org's Gary Edwards. In this installment, Gary discusses the importance of open document formats and hints to the release date of OpenOffice.org 2.0: 'No one knows for certain when OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable will be released, but Mad Penguin's bet is that the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.'"

Fantastic

[MaestroSartori]

He's finally explained in clear terms why the MS-touted XML stuff in Office 2003 isn't useful to anyone else. I'd been idly wondering for a while, and other articles/interviews seem to take it for granted. Anyone else who's curious, the answer is on page 2:

...the problem is the well-known binary key in the Microsoft's XML header of every Microsoft XML document. That binary key holds a great deal of the information that we need about the layout definitions of the Microsoft XML file format. We can do a content-based transformation very well. Microsoft's content is in perfect XML file format. Their styles, though, are locked up in that binary key.

So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place :(

ETA 2005/10/20

[hexene]

A showstopper (#i55330#) has come up, and as a result there will be a third Release Candidate. So estimated time of arrival has gone from 13 October to the 20th.

No Office 2K3 Prof? Now who's talking nonsense?

[markdowling]

In the quote you actually use, he doesn't say "Office XP Professional 2003", he says "Office Professional 2003" which does exist.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/ professional.mspx [microsoft.com]

Due to the similarity in file formats and program functionality it's not completely unfair to use "XP/2003" as nomenclature but Mad Penguin's punctuation is not Gary Edwards fault.

Finally, he says you need Exchange 2003/Sharepoint/Project Server etc. to use Office 2003 to the fullest - which is true because MS uses proprietary means for information sharing, whereas with open standards it wouldn't matter which server people use. "Using Office right" involves data interchange if we are to believe Microsoft (with those stupid dinosaur ads). You fail to address this point.

Re:ETA 2005/10/20

[Qubit]

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5 5330 [openoffice.org]

Well, looks like it's fixed now... ;-)

And...

[game kid]

...when someone asks how you got the full version of Adobe Acrobat, one can just say, "I didn't. I just used OpenOffice.org to export a PDF. Microsoft Office can't do that without that overpriced Adobe thing, but OOo can."

When they ask how you found that, and then why they are stuck with that $x00-$x000 piece of crap Microsoft calls an office suite, you can look at them and (before answering said questions) smile at them and yourself with pride.

My new compy has OpenOffice.org, and no version of Microsoft Office (save for maybe WordPad, if that counts), for obvious reasons hinted at above.

Re:Non-free?

[Markus Registrada]

Answering my own post:

    http://dba.openoffice.org/drivers/sqlite/ [openoffice.org]
    http://oooauthors.org/en/FAQs/Database/connectors/ 20041114b [oooauthors.org]
    http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/html/ [ch-werner.de]

but I'd like to hear from people working on it. Will there be an OOo package with SQLite or something in there, and no Java? (E.g. on Debian and Ubuntu?)

Re:Why the fascination with XML?

[Bogtha]

Why has everyone suddenly gone googoo over XML? As all this interoperability nonsense shows, it often is far from the perfect solution.

Well no, it shows that if you try hard enough, you can undo the interoperability benefits of XML.

Yes, it's not perfect, but it solves a number of problems:

• Parsing into structure (XML)
• Escaping special characters (XML)
• Multilingual documents (XML)
• Character encoding issues (XML)
• Addressing parts of the document (XPath, xml:id)
• Transforming the document into other formats (XSLT)
• Web formatting (convert into HTML with XSLT on the client or server)
• Print presentation/PDF output (XSL:FO)
• Styling (CSS)
• Scripting (DOM)

...and lots more that I can't remember off the top of my head. The point is, a lot of things you would normally have to think about when creating a new format, you don't have to think about with XML because it's all done in a standard way, and there's a huge amount of software that you can reuse in your applications.

And, of sheer practical benefit, if you start what seems to be a "small, simple" format, you don't have to hack these things on afterwards when reality kicks in and your "small, simple" format balloons in complexity.

XML certainly isn't a silver bullet, but it's a hell of a lot better than creating a format by hand.

Re:Stable sort in calc

[Tet]

It would have been nice if it supported header rows locked for scrolling like the other two (Calc, Excel), but it doesn't. That, I can live with.

Sure it does. Position your cursor in the top left cell of the section you wish to scroll. Then View->Freeze Panes and everything above and to the left of that cell will be locked.

Not just a "standard format" issue

[Lifewish]

The company I did intern work for over the summer received a lot of .pdfs. Problem was, their internal resume-searcher system (need a contractor with skill x? Just search for it. Very handy) could only read text, doc, rtf and (I think) html.

I spent a couple of hours figuring out a system to handle this (hey, I was cheap labour). I ended up using the trial download of this system [solidpdf.com] which worked very well. The bonus was that it has a command line interface so it was easy to do a vbs wrapper to recurse through the folder-full-of-resumes looking for pdfs. It's a very good litte program, at least til someone writes the necessary filters for koconverter. (And no, I'm not affiliated with this company).

Anyway, the point I intended to make is that there are good reasons for companies to be unhappy with pdfs that are completely separate from the standardisation thing.