opendocument

Microsoft under fire for ODF glitch in Excel

Microsoft has come under fire for spreadsheet interoperability issues in its recent release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, but the company says it is an issue inherent in OpenDocument Format 1.1.

The software giant released last week the second service pack for Office 2007, which provides support for documents saved in the ODF 1.1 format.

However, Rob Weir, chief ODF architect at IBM, posted a report on his blog saying SP2 had problems reading some ODF spreadsheets saved by OpenOffice.org and lost data by "silently stripping out formulas" from cells. The resulting spreadsheet displays &… Read more

EU investigation into Open XML vote still ongoing

European antitrust regulators are investigating whether Microsoft abused its desktop software market dominance in its effort to standardize the Office Open XML file formats.

The European Commission's antitrust regulatory body sent queries to several European countries to see how the standards-setting process was working, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.

The investigation is still ongoing, he added.

The effort stems from a complaint lodged by anti-Microsoft lobbying group ECIS (European Commission for Interoperable Systems). The Commission said in January that it is exploring whether the Open XML file formats are sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products.

The Wall Street Journal in … Read more

Challenges coming to ISO Open XML vote?

Now that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been certified as an ISO standard, there is a possibility that the vote leading to that result will be challenged. It seems Microsoft is already counting on it.

The ISO on Wednesday officially announced that Open XML received enough votes to become a standard, reversing a previous attempt in September that failed.

But there have been several reports of "irregularities" in the voting of the 87 national standards bodies that participated.

Those complaints could lead to a formal appeal of the votes which, under ISO rules, need to be lodged by … Read more

Open XML appears to clear ISO standard vote

Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.

As the votes come in from the 87 national standards bodies, so have a number of complaints of irregularities and strong-arm tactics in different countries, including Poland and Norway.

The OpenMalaysia blog, run by openness advocates and students, found that the ballot, which closed Saturday night, had the necessary combination of more than two-thirds approve votes and less than a quarter for disapprove.

Lawyer and standards expert Andrew Updegrove, an advocate for … Read more

U.S. expected to recommend Open XML as ISO standard

The United States is expected to recommend that Microsoft's Open XML file formats be ratified as an international standard, according to people involved in the process.

Two members of the technical committee tasked with setting the national position on a pivotal vote said the States will retain its "Approve" position in a vote to make Open XML a standard at the International Organization for Standards (ISO).

The chair of the committee, Patrick Durusau, who is also the editor of the rival OpenDocument standard, said that the controversy surrounding Microsoft's Open XML standards bid is being fueled … Read more

Apple's Leopard to support Open Document Format (Updated)

There are so many features listed on Apple's Leopard landing page that it might be easy to overlook this one (which Glyn Moody pointed out): OpenDocument Format, or ODF, support in the new operating system. It's baked right into OS X, and TextEdit will also support both Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenDocument formats.

At some point, Microsoft may also come around to ODF. In the meantime, there's Apple. Innovative as usual.

[UPDATED: As someone pointed out to me in an email, I made a mistake on "OpenDocument" in TextEdit. That appears to be a reference … Read more

Zoho adds Google-like collaboration to spreadsheets

Zoho, who was at Under the Radar last week, upgraded their spreadsheet application, called Sheet, on Friday. The team added Zoho Chat integration and the ability for multiple users to work on a spreadsheet at the same time. Users of Google Spreadsheets will be accustomed to this functionality, and with the update, Zoho joins the fray of online collaborative tools (see our Under the Radar roundup of this category.)

Also new with the update is support for OpenDocument Sheet, which allows users of OpenOffice to work on and freely exchange documents.

Zoho Sheet still doesn't have the option to … Read more