OpenDocument

I actually wanted to do a whole series on Office 2007/OpenOffice 3 interoperability but it just didn't work out. New developments, however, give me an opportunity to tackle on the more import parts: file formats.

Background information

Microsoft used a binary file format (doc/xsl/ppt) until Office 2003, then they switched to OOXML and now it is (docx/xslx/pptx). OpenOffice (OOo) has very good support for reading and writing the binary format. They have a rudimentary import filter for OOXML but it is nowhere near complete, having big gaps in such areas as SmartArt and others. Also, no export filter exists, OOo users have to use the binary format to send files back to Microsoft Office users (yes, they could now use ODF but not really, more on that later).

OOo uses ODF (odt/ods/odp) and this became an ISO standard. Microsoft promised OpenDocument support based on the current spec, which does lack some definition on formulas and OOo 3 is basing its file format on the not finalized newer version of OpenDocument.

Now

So, Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 with OpenDocument support was released and many people are not happy. Apart from the obvious Excel blunder, several things are simply not supported, rather than 'differently implemented.' While these changes do send negative messages, OpenDocument is also option #4 under 'Save as', right after the native format, template and 97-03 DOC, which at least looks like good intentions.

Amongst many other items, the Office help files (referenced when you export to ODF) point out that the following things are just dropped during the export:

• Track Changes, collaborative editing is now quite difficult (the main point for not using PDF!). It's a showstopper for my frequent group assignments.
• Table of Contents is converted to text, which is more or less ok.
• Page break sometimes breaks other fields.

Apart from these shortcomings, some acceptable, others not, and probably not fixed until SP 3, there are the things OpenOffice does not display right. Who's fault these are is probably impossible to tell without consulting Oasis, Microsoft, Sun and then choosing an opinion at random. Here are a few I ran into when opening 3 documents in OpenOffice:

From Word

• Table of Contents: every item on a singe page...your 30 page paper is now 75.
• Formatting rules inconsistenly applied. No consistency between "style" and overriding "font" definition.

From Excel

• Formula bug, forget it.
• No graphs, only an OLE placeholder is shown, at least with a simple 3D bar chart.

From PowerPoint

• Empty line items show bullet points, on Office they are just greyed out when the line is actively selected and empty otherwise.
• Default placeholders sometimes present, especially when Master slides applied and not all fields used.
• Indentations have different settings, text thus is easily flowing over regions occupied by other things. Especially if paragraph indention has been modified by hand.

All these things are not terribly bad, most could probably be fixed in 1 or 2 revision of the respective software packages. The problem, however, is time. The next Office service pack could be years away and still not solve outstanding issues. Even OpenOffice doesn't have a major release until Fall (and let's face it, major changes would be necessary) and i think there is at least somewhat of a case to be made to not water down the OpenOffice implementation just because Microsoft can't do it right.

Finally, these issues are only from Office to OpenOffice, at least a few problems, and likely many more, are also present when going from OpenOffice to Office.

It's the browser wars all over again, and I still can't exchange a presentation without relying on the doc format to even get close to be able to run it and not be embarrassed about what pops up on the screen.

Foreword

Before the summer, hardly anyone I knew had Office 2007. Now, however, many have bought new laptops for the Fall semester and it's no surprise that they come preloaded with Office 2007. Combine that with the fact that my new college really likes group presentations and group papers and you get a field study of OpenOffice 3.0 vs Microsoft Office 2007.

Results

Short version: OpenOffice 3.0 is in many ways inferior to Office 2007 and exchanging files has gone from nearly perfect to rather limited. After five weeks I had to bite the bullet and purchase Office 2007.

Long version: It's not the end of the world and OpenOffice will probably catch up in most areas within a release or two. However, there are several pitfalls I encountered along the way and so I want to present a list here on what is not possible, when it will likely be fixed and how to work around it.

The posts will roughly cover the following topics:

1. Styles, Colors and Fonts
2. OOXML
3. Citations and Sources
4. Powerpoint and SmartArt
5. Excel vs Calc

Styles, Colors and Fonts

After you have seen half a dozen presentations and papers done in Office 2007 you will notice that they actually did a really nice job of making things look decent. I'm sure within the next five years we will all not be able to stand the default Powerpoint templates but for now they are a welcome change when compared to the often crude looks of Office 2003 and OpenOffice (especially before 3.0).

New fonts embedded in Vista and Office 2007 have been a major factor in improving visual design by mostly retiring the ancient Arial and Times New Roman combination in favor of Cambria, Calibri etc. These fonts are possibly also the most problematic thing because they cannot easily be patched away.

Here's why: you cannot get them for free and there are no equivalent substitutes. If you google 'office 2007 fonts linux' you will find out a few ways to get them installed but that's dubious at best. For one, several bloggers point out that you can get the fonts from the free PowerPoint viewer but the license expressly states that use of the fonts is only valid on the Windows operating system. I'm pretty sure that the license I paid for grants me the right to use them outside the virtual machine but without delving into the EULAs I'm not going to speculate. The fonts directly from the manufacturer cost $300 by the way.

Which then leads to the second point: substitutes. As pointed out in this article, fonts that are metrically equivalent matter. For now you'll either have to pay for the fonts one way or another or resort to less pretty fonts. These will still become the expected standard in the near-term so expect to be the odd one out.

Therefore let's hope (or start a fundraiser so) that the same things happens that did for the Core Fonts package. Red Hat paid for the Liberation fonts and they are close enough so that you didn't have to use the Core fonts if you didn't want to. I'm not holding my breath, though, since the same firm which did the Liberation fonts worked on the C* fonts from Microsoft.

Better default color schemes are one of the additions that really add to the value of Office 2007 and where OpenOffice definitely needs to catch up. It was certainly possible to create tables which looked just as harmonious and professional in Office 2003 given enough time and talent but these defaults make that possible for the average person.

It just is really nice if you can get from a plain table such as the one on the left to a table such as on the right with just one click:

Default colors are a point where it could be comparatively easy to improve the look and feel of open source software but it is often overlooked. Take KOrganizer for example, you could take a look at the KDE/Oxygen color palette and set the colors accordingly and have a really nice looking calendar, similar to how iCal looks really nice on default on OS X, instead of the greenish nightmare that it is today. Why is this important? Because most people do not change their defaults. They often don't know where so good defaults make a difference, especially for an office suite.

These table styles and such are also not imported very well in OpenOffice but that will be covered in Part 2. To summarize, defaults have improved, making documents better looking without having a designated designer on hand but it isn't impossible for OpenOffice to get there. If you have such abilities to produce great defaults, consider giving your input to the OOo devs.

Check back in a few days or subscribe to the RSS feed on your right to find out even more about the mysteries of MS Office, OpenOffice and stuff…yay!