Danes ditch Microsoft, take ODF road - at last The Danish Parliament has agreed to ditch some Microsoft-based software in favour of the ODF standard from April next year. According to version2.dk and courtesy of politken.dk, parliamentary parties decided - after four years of deliberation - to use the Open Document Format in all Danish state office documents. “My ambition …
Word and Excel are rarely interoperable with other versions of the said software.
A few years ago our daughter came home with (it turned out) a very small Excel spreadsheet on a CD she needed to use for her homework I had to spend half an hour searching for converters between two office versions - a simple csv would have sufficed.
Very annoying.
Good on you Danes.
ttfn
yeah good job danes, fleece/tax the population while you figure out that there is zero macro support, and then fleece them again when you decide to revert to the superior format.
it's as if no one here recognises the standard politicians scam.
(charge them twice w/o doing a single thing)
When I get sent a "document" in some MS format (or previously wordstar etc.), I am only expected to read it, not edit it. So all I have to do is run 'strings' on the file, and read the text. This has the added advantage of being able to read all the supposedly deleted paragraphs which linger in the document (most embarrassing security flaw). Usually, I can't be bothered.
Companies could 'standardize' on 2 or more office suites, and enable users to demand the standards.
* starts Open Office, goes to tools -> macros -> record macro *
Incidentally I can choose to write my macros in OO Basic, Bean Shell, Python or Javascript. So if your reason for choosing an office suite is its support for macros, OO wins hands down. Now, if by "zero macro support" you really mean "doesn't support VBA" then you're right but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Tough times for Microsoft. The competition's hotting up and people are as mad as hell and aren't going to take it much longer.
It can't be long before a major Government finally bites the bullet and weans themselves off the treadmill paying Redmond for the same old shite in a different package. People don't need Office -- OK, granted that a *very* few power users may use 50% of the features, but the vast majority need to do very simple things.
When a major Government does switch over, others can't be far behind and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down into a mixed pile of metaphors.
Microsoft got a head start with their proprietary standards or as we like to say de facto standards.
This has lead to a lock in, of immense proportions, It is not easy to break that lock in because it is always easier to do nothing.
The interesting thing with open standards is there will never be any need to return to any proprietary "standards".
i4i owns patents on techniques that M$ OOXML use ... so ... under court order:
* M$ has to stop shipping products that use OOXML
* M$ has to patch existing software so that OOXML is not usable
* M$ has refused, to date, to pay for a license to the technology from i4i
* OOXML users bear the expense of removing functionality
* OOXML users bear the expense of converting or orphaning OOXML documents
So, once again, M$ has no open standards available in their products.
You reap what you sew.
Actually, the government coalition (liberal+conservative), with science Minister Helge Sander as the most fervent proponent, backed having both ODF and OOXML as standard formats for public services, but the opposition with support from the right-wing party "Dansk Folkeparti" managed to negotiate a single-standard choice. But it was a pretty close thing.
I'm happy with the result, both because I prefer ODF over OOXML (which I think is a mastodont) and because having a single standard format is much easier than having two.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
