chrisbray.co.uk

In light of a recent post by Rob Weir on the woeful inadequacies of Microsoft Excel 2007's financial functions I thought this might make interesting reading...

Microsoft have formally announced that Office 2007 SP2 will be updated to support ODF 1.1, and NOT OOXML! Office will also be updated to include support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A and Microsoft's own XML Paper Standard (XPS) which is currently being prepared to be presented to the standardisation boards.

This move has been treated with trepidation by some ODF advocates and we do need to wait until early 2009 to see what Microsoft will actually do, but I firmly believe it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Hopefully this will mean that they have recognised the multitude of mistakes they made with OOXML and that ODF is a much more suitable format, and with their joining the standards boards and a continued promise of interoperability we can only hope this is the first step of many!

Watch this space I guess!

The Register is today running a story on how the BSI will face a high court action from the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group over it's controversial u-turn regarding the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML as an ISO standard.

The BSI reversed it's decision to oppose this "standard" in March this year after Microsoft failed to fast-track OOXML into the ISO and will face action in the High Court backed by a number of British advocates of open techology include the Open Source Consortium.

If you ask me it's the right thing to do, the BSI reversed its decision for no good reason other than pressure from Microsoft or one of their cronies. OOXML has no place on the ISO standards roster, especially when the ISO already have a perfectly good, openly developed, standard for office documents! The more the BSI know they've done wrong the better.

If you wish to support this action, and at the same time earn a number of other benefits too, you should consider joining the UKUUG.

It would appear that someone was listening when I was amongst the people calling for the ISO committee that was voting on it to Vote No To Office Open XML since it failed to meet the criteria set out by the ISO for adoption as an International Standard.

Microsoft put their typically positive spin on this citing it as a milestone towards the adoption (press release can be found here) but the fact is that this is a blow to the ill thought out and technically flawed format.

Hopefully there will be more support for the far more open and truly cross platformODF format suggested by OASIS which has already been implemented by many office suites.