Australian Govt Re-Kindles Office File Format War 119
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's peak IT strategy group has issued a cautious updated appraisal of currently available office productivity suite file formats, in what appears to be an attempt to more fully explain its thinking about the merits of open standards such as OpenDocument versus more proprietary file formats promulgated by vendors like Microsoft."
TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
What isn't being questioned is whether the question being asked is the right one. Despite the huge investment in "office" technologies, have they really increased productivity or effectiveness?
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years, software development has gone from something where you trod a minefield of minor issues and only the highly skilled could safely write business logic, to something where an invisible, benevolent being holds your hand at every step, autocompleting, identifying deprecations, and allowing you simply to concentrate on getting the job done. As a result, programmers are more productive. It is interesting watching new graduates and realising that they have simply never experienced a world in which you type, compile, fix, type, compile, fix....with most of fix being minor problems that the compiler complains about, and then start actually to debug. In those same 20 years, has office technology got more efficient to the same degree in terms of actual work done? No. Exactly like the medieval monks, the basic task of transcribing the Bible has barely improved (spelling and grammar checkers? Look at the frequent homophones nowadays - car breaks, loose for lose, and the rest of them) and all the effort has gone into illuminating the title page and margins. Office 2010 is basically an illuminated manuscript generator, absorbing vast amounts of effort in decorating a piece of paper or a screen to conceal the fact that the actual content is mundane and boring.
The really interesting and exciting stuff is happening in CMS-based websites where people post simple marked up text that stands or fails on the quality of its content, not whether it complies with the corporate standard for margin width and precise positioning of the logo.
The new paradigm that is increasingly expected by younger people is a refocussing on the text. Viewed on small screens, decoration isn't much use. More important is immediacy and filing, and email, IM, BBM, even Facebook and twitter, are much better at these. The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.
The question isn't whether Microsoft blobXML or ODF is better; it is how many employed people actually really need to be using them at all.
Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score:1, Interesting)
Simple text files are never superior. Please stop being so damn backwards about this. And I know /. will probably even mod this funny, but I'm completely serious.
Which Microsoft format? XLS? (Score:2, Interesting)
I recently received an XLS sheet, it wouldn't open (I have Excel circa 2003). It's silly to call Microsoft's formatS one format just because of the extension.
After playing with the XLS, I discovered that it actually was their XML format in a zip archive. They seem to now be calling that XLS instead of XLSD (?). I found I could open it only in OpenOffice (I wasn't going to do a major expensive upgrade of MS Office just to open this one weird file), I renamed it XLSD and simply opened it.
And that was the end of my Excel use. Enough, I've just had enough of being forced to endlessly upgrade with a series of incompatible formats. He can say that the Australian govt should standardize on *a* Microsoft format, but if *Microsoft* can't standardize on one format, I'm certainly not paying to chase them everytime they change it.
Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see why normal people wouldn't be able to write a LaTeX document. Setting up a new document may be tricky for a absolute newbie, but that's nothing that can't be taken care by a template with a half dozen lines, and learned in a couple of minutes. From there, basically the only thing a user needs to know is to use commands such as \chapter, \section, \subsection and the like, and know how to write. How is that hard?