OpenOffice.org Beta Fails the Office 2007 Test
I am a big fan of OpenOffice so im excited about how this new beta for their suite will stand up in terms of compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007. Things aren’t looking rosy for Open Office users according to PC World:
“OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just entered public beta, and it promises plenty of improvements from the previous version. Mac users, in particular, will be pleased with the new native Aqua UI. Unfortunately, however, the one feature that I was really looking forward to on the Windows side — compatibility with the Office 2007 XML file formats — could still clearly use a lot of work.
As an experiment, I saved a simple Word 2003 document in Word 2007 format. Office 2007 opened it just fine, but OpenOffice.org Writer only got as far as the first two lines of the text; instead of skipping the next line, the rest was truncated. An Excel 2007 template fared no better. OpenOffice.org Calc preserved labels, numbers, and formulae; macros, embedded graphics, and page layout options disappeared. A plain .xlsx file created with the same template yielded identical results.”
I’m very disappointed to have to say it, but OpenOffice.org’s support for the Office 2007 file formats simply isn’t ready for prime time. I haven’t had time yet to do a full review of the suite, but the tests I tried were extremely basic import/export operations on documents that were not in the least bit complex. Unfortunately, the beta OpenOffice.org struck out.
It’s strange, if you think about it. Wasn’t the whole point of XML file formats for Office to make the documents more compatible with other software? Isn’t XML a self-describing, human-readable file format that should make reverse-engineering a breeze (compared to the old, binary Office formats, at least)? And isn’t OOXML, the Office 2007 file format, a public ISO standard?
But then, if you’ve been following the news, you know that there’s more going on with OOXML than meets the eye. Not to mention the fact that Office 2007 itself reportedly doesn’t conform to the published standards.
The final release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still a few months away (and, to be fair, the developers do not recommend the current beta release for production use). There may still be time to get involved and help iron out the bugs with Office 2007 support — but I doubt it. For now, my recommendation remains the same: If you’re an Office 2007 user, like me, you’ll probably want to keep saving your documents in Office 2003 format — at least until OpenDocument becomes more mainstream.
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