The Foundation sees this as a contradiction to the EU’s own interoperability goals. Although XLSX is standardized as OOXML according to ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft’s implementations often deviate from the specifications. Furthermore, features often change undocumented, which complicates compatibility with open-source software such as LibreOffice.
The actual article— Hacker News.
And also:
The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary.
which complicates compatibility with open-source software such as LibreOffice.
Or any competitor. Which is why this “standard” should be declared anticompetitive.
I fully support this. This is a very easy to implement. 99% of the documents don’t require specific msoffice undocumented features that odf format doesn’t support
Yes, it would probably force microsoft to adhere to the specs if their files didn’t work more users.
or you know you could require them to comply
“OOXML” is literally just an XML serialization of MS Office internal data structures that Microsoft bribed the standards body to push through.
“bribed” is a gross simplifiction of the almost hilariously evil plot they pulled to get OOXML certified. They actually bribed a couple of smaller nation states to become IETF members and vote for Microsoft’s standard. It was a major scandal back in the day but formally legal.
I remember, only trouble is a lot of people at the time didn’t care or were paid loads of money to not care.
Also the name Office Open XML right at the time OpenOffice was the only one about before oracle came in and fucked it over
It’s like noticing a car crash and looking back… you know you shouldn’t and yet it’s somehow mesmerizing. So… where can I actually read about this please?
Wikipedia for a beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML I remember The Register having a more detailed (and pretty snarky) article about it back then, but I didn’t search for it yet.
Ah, so niche but of course there is a great Wikipedia article for this, thank you!
I was listening to the podcase episode 318 “Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein w/ Tim Schwab” of Tech Won’t Save Us thinking that honestly I had such a low esteem for Gates surely it couldn’t get worst. Well, I was clearly very wrong.
Now to read this after listening to the podcast is a great example showcasing how dearly Microsoft KEEPS on fighting for its monopolistic position. It’s not a “oh it just happen” kind of situation. It’s a constant investment of resources in the worst kind of ways, not into making the product better, but rather this. Again, unsurprising but whenever people argue about Gates being a “good” person or how Microsoft “changed” and isn’t what it was in the 2000s they are unfortunately very naive.
Anyway, digging into this, thanks again.
You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to set someomes ideas about Mr Gates right.
I remember that plot also gumming up IETF business because the bribed nations just stopped participating after voting for Microsoft.
I kinda get it though. I think every single time in my life I’ve sent a document in the non-Microsoft format I’ve got a reply saying they couldn’t open it. That’s from LibreOffice and from Mac.
Either the person is lying, because MS Office claims compatibility with OpenDocument files, or it isn’t actually compatible and Microsoft itself is lying.
Give me CSV or give me death
CSV does not allow storing formulas, just results. It is a good format to share data, but it is not a good format to store spreadsheets which very often contain such formulas.
Formulas are just strings, no reason you couldn’t store over in a CSV.
Maybe your software doesn’t want you to do that, but that’s a problem with that specific software.
Do you know of any software which stores formulas in CSV?
It’s an option when saving in LibreOffice Calc.
Would be a pretty straightforward macro to (un)quote the formulas in Excel or Google Sheets etc.
I didn’t know calc could do that, cool!
you can store anything in CSV, it’s just not always very practical ;)
Just like opening a .doc file in notepad, technically all the information is there
csv is a pretty good data sharing format, but not very well suited for spreadsheets. Just because you can shove anything you want in there doesn’t mean you should.
I think it’s perfectly well suited to spreadsheet. It’s more-or-less perfect for tabular human-readable data. If you want to embed fancy things like OLE objecta and ActiveX controls and helpful animated characters then you may well be better served with another format.
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