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Meet ISO 29500

Posted on 6 May 2008 at 14:58

Simon Jones picks through the bones as the OOXML saga finally draws to a close, and looks forward at forthcoming versions of OpenOffice.

Even now it's all over, many people still think there should be only one standard document format, or at least that the world doesn't need another one. They forget that JPEG, TIFF and PNG are all different ISO standards for storing still images, and that each is useful in its own way. Each does a slightly different job in a slightly different way, but the end results are very similar, and so it is with OOXML and ODF. If it's okay to have multiple standard image-file formats, why not multiple document formats?

The FUD being spread over intellectual property rights also bears revealing resemblances to image file formats. Some people claim Microsoft's patents will stop anyone implementing OOXML in a serious way, even though Microsoft has signed an irrevocable covenant not to sue anyone over use of its OOXML patents (or any future versions). Both Ecma International and ISO have strict rules about patents and standards and, generally speaking, won't issue a standard where a patent is involved unless the holder of that patent waives its rights, or allows anyone to license the technology in a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" way. The GIF image format, in widespread use on the web since 1987, wasn't and couldn't become an ISO standard because Unisys held a patent on the LZW compression algorithm it employed, and Unisys sought to cash in on the patent once the GIF format became popular. This caused many graphics applications to drop their support for GIF and so it fell into disuse, with the patent-free ISO standard PNG format being developed to take its place. PNG also happens to be technically far superior to GIF. Both Ecma International and ISO, along with the leading experts in open-source software and intellectual property, are satisfied that Microsoft's covenant not to sue is enough evidence of goodwill. The covenant applies to every person on the planet, now and in the future, so anyone at all can develop any application to work with OOXML files without worrying that Microsoft's lawyers will come knocking at their door. So the IP argument is a complete non-issue, yet some people are still using it for FUD-mongering.

I expect the FUD and grumbling to simmer on for a while yet, until people realise the sky hasn't fallen and that ODF and OOXML can co-exist, co-operate and even benefit from increased collaboration. Microsoft has said it would like a future version of Office to be able to save directly into ODF format, without having to rely on a half-arsed "add-in" that leaves you with a read-only OOXML copy of the original ODF document. Sun and OpenOffice, Office's nearest rivals, have also announced that OpenOffice 3 will be able to load and save OOXML documents directly.

Excel 2007 chart funnies

Martin Newman asked recently in the Office 2007 conference on Cix about a problem he'd been having with some pie charts in Excel:

This started when some users reported getting odd results copying graphs from Excel to Word. Legends and labels got moved all over the shop when the graphs were pasted into Word. In investigating this problem, I've come across something I really don't understand.

I have an XLS file, generated and, to my knowledge, until now only touched with Excel 2007 (the file was deliberately saved in 97-2003 compatibility mode). I've focused on one pie chart with segment percentage annotations and legends (there are many graphs in the Excel files I'm looking at). If the file is opened in Excel 2007 and Excel 2003, the pie chart looks different - in 2007, the percentage annotations in the small segments are floating (as intended), tied to the segments with lines, but actually on the segments in the case of the larger segments. When opened in 2003, all the annotations float but only those that have lead-out lines in Excel 2007 have them in Excel 2003.