I would strongly recommend Office 2007 (and other Office versions too) users to upgrade to OpenOffice. Keeping up Microsoft's exotic formats gives really no business benefit to anyone.

@1 - Mika, I agree with you completely. Howver, the reality of business (in my neck of the woods) is that we DO have to interact (collaborate?) with the enemy on a pretty regular basis.

I'm promoting this because I think it's needed but I'd recommend people use non-MS products instead of proprietary file formats. Unfortunately due to the short-sightedness of the ODF foundation;

{ Link }
{ Link }

They seem to have lost any chance they have of providing a standard file format. (who will trust the new format now?) .

So, I guess we need to support Office 2007 :-(

Gavin -

ODF is alive and well. As I have posted in a comment on another idea here, the OpenDocument Foundation (of which I was briefly a member) was down to three guys who simply fell apart. It has nothing to do with ODF's acceptance, and all the noise about even their plaintive whining has come from Microsoft and its supporters. It was stupid of OASIS to ever let the OpenDocument Foundation use the name, but they are in absolutely no way a mouthpiece for the standard or an indicator of its viability. I will repeat, ODF is alive, well and an international ISO standard being adopted at a great rate by companies and governments all over the world. We do not have to support Office 2007, and I don't think we should, beyond the already excellent support for the older binary formats, which let people interoperate easily. See { Link } for some sense about how widely spread the Open XML formats are "in the wild", and then compare

DOCX (Office 2007 standard document filetype): { Link }

ODT (ODF standard document filetype): { Link }

I get 883 .docx files and 90,200 .odt files, but even in the interest of interoperability with Office 2007, here is

.DOC (Office 2007 and before binary format, supported by Symphony): { Link }

28, 200,000 and growing

So, given these numbers, should IBM spend time supporting Open XML, and simply let people interoperate with what already works well?

- Ben

@4 - This presupposes that it's an even playing field. It's not. My take on it is if you want to unseat the hugely entrenched champion of the field (M$ Office), then you have to be just as good (can read the same files as them) AND better. ODF is better, but IMHO, not better enough to outweigh the lack of full compatibility.

FWIW - I'm not making this up out of whole wool. I've sat with folks and tried to convince them to make the move, and this is the #1 complaint / issue they raise.

@5 - You may be right, but I've also sat through IBM making OS/2 handle Windows programs "as well or better than Windows" and have all the developers realize they only had to develop Windows programs. Supporting .doc and .xls files supports the hugely entrenched champion office formats without further entrenching the hugely entrenched champion office provider. Just my opinion, of course.

@6 - You raise a good analogy, which coming from an OS/2 background I grok. My first Domino server was OS/2 2.11...

At risk of beating this to death. I do see a key difference here. In the OS/2 world, folks were trying to plan for _future_ development, "If I develop going forward for OS/2 it'll only run on OS/2. If I development for Windows, it'll run on both." This leads as you note to something NOT to OS/2's benefit.

This situation is different, in that there's a HUGE installed base of M$ out there already. Even though Office 2007 marketshre is not huge, it's still got the mindshare as a natural progression from Office 200x. We're asking people to move off of their installed base to something new... and better. In that case, it needs to work as well as what they are used to. You can open Office 2007 docs in Office 2003, 2002, and convert them for Office 2000. We need to have the same, IMHO.

I don't care if ODF is stopped. If it's perfect, there's no need to improve it :)
Microsoft OpenXML format was rejected by the Standardization Organization, so ODF is at the moment THE Standard for office files. OpenOffice users save their files of course still in Office 95 format, so that a broader audience can use them. But in future, more and more people should start to use ODF, and then it's not needed to save as Office 95 anymore. A new standard would take again years before it's supported by all users.

@7 - I may be proven wong over time, but so far there is a great deal of resistance to use the new formats even among MS Office users. Most use the older binary formats for interoperability. There is a huge difference between an entrenched installed base of the MS Office application (about which there is no question) and an entrenched installed base of the new document formats (about which there are many questions, not the least of which is shown here { Link } ). We don't need to help Microsoft establish a new entrenched base, and I say that as a Microsoft partner who gets a lot of business from them.

The Office 2007 file formats are NOT the "standard" file formats approved by ISO/IEC 29500; so it's not worthy to waste any effort to support them.

Getting data *off* MS-Office format and pushing it onto an interoperable format would seem pretty important to me.