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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.

More curiously, when copy/pasted from:

l Excel 2007 into Word 2007 - some of the legends are lost

l Excel 2003 into Word 2003 - the graphs look the same in Word and Excel

l Excel 2007 into Word 2003 - the graphs look the same in Word and Excel (but not the same as in the row above)

I'm not really sure what to make of all this, although I'm sure there's something very obvious going on - perhaps the most surprising thing is that pasting from Excel 2007 into Word 2007 produces crud, whereas copying from Excel 2007 into 2003 produces sensible results.

This boils down to two related problems: copying and pasting charts between versions gives different results, and data labels on a pie chart in Excel 2007 appear in different positions in Excel 2003.

When you copy a chart between different versions of Office, the chart is rendered as an image. The target application says to the source application "give me an image", the source application obliges, and the target application pastes that image into the document. Since it's the source application that's doing the rendering, it gets it right: the target application then scales the image to fit the new document, shrinking or expanding the whole image to fit.

When you copy and paste within Office 2007, however, it's an editable chart object rather than an image that's pasted and resized to fit the available space - for instance, to stay within the margins of a Word document. This resizing may change the layout of the chart as titles, legends and labels all try to fit the new space while still keeping their original font sizes. Hence, you'll see things like the legend being truncated. Since the chart remains editable, you can click on the legend and drag to reposition or resize it (you even get to use Excel's Chart Tools context tabs inside Word). You can choose to paste a chart in Office 2007 as an image instead of a chart object. Click Home | Clipboard | Paste | "Paste Special..." and choose one of the picture formats rather than a Chart or Graphic Object: PNG is probably the best format to choose.

When it comes to the data labels on pie charts, Excel 2007 has an extra option for "Label Position", which can be set to Center, Inside End, Outside End or Best Fit. It defaults to Best Fit, which will put the label inside the segment if it will fit and outside if it won't. Where segments are too close together, a label may be moved slightly, so as not to obscure others, and you can also do this manually by dragging. When this happens, Excel draws a line from the label to its segment, so you know to which it refers. Excel 2003 doesn't have this "Label Position" property, but places all labels outside their segments by default. However, any labels that had been given lines by Excel 2007 will keep them in 2003, because it considers them to have been placed manually.

Excel 2007 does a great job of keeping its charts compatible with previous versions, but the fact that it has a completely new graphics engine must occasionally get in the way, and this is just one of those times. To get around it you'd have to change the placement of the data labels from Best Fit to Outside End.

OpenOffice 2.4

OpenOffice 2.4 has just been released and, while the improvements in this release are mainly minor, some are very welcome. OpenOffice 2.4 is now able to open documents from and save them to WebDAV servers, such as SharePoint, via HTTP and HTTPS. It can create PDF files directly, including relative links, document references, security - such as denying the ability to print or copy the resulting content - and using the PDF/A (Archive) standard. The File | Print dialog is also more user-friendly.