Microsoft dirty tricks with Office

drhowarddrfine Peon

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Microsoft claims to give full support to standard ODF files in Office. ODF is why Microsoft created their competing OOXML for but ODF is portable across all suites. But Excel's implementation is wrong:

It is missing a proper definition of spreadsheet formulas. This is the truck-sized hole that Microsoft drove through in their implementation. Sure Excel saves formulas in ODF documents, just in a separate namespace where no other application is currently designed to look for them. The result is that anyone trying to open an ODF spreadsheet created in Excel will have it rejected. Excel reading an ODF spreadsheet created by another application does something worse, it will use the last value for the data in the spreadsheet cell that should be governed by the formula. The formulas themselves are silently dropped.

Yet Microsoft Office SP2 claims to have a fully compliant version of ODF, and that's probably true, as defined by the specification. It's just completely useless at interoperating with other vendors products. This is not interoperability, it's an attack on the very concept.
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