ODF Spreadsheet Bickering: What It Means to an Enterprise
by Volker Weber
To summarize, this in-between time (between the OpenOffice.org de facto standard and the wait for the officially approved 1.2 standard) means there isn't one way to handle this problem. The vendors would like you to believe that there is (their way), but in reality there isn't. Ultimately, this will resolve itself over time. ODF 1.2 will be approved, and there will finally be an approved standard that everyone--IBM, Microsoft, Sun (Sun/Oracle)--can follow.
Until then, if an enterprise does want to use ODF, the best strategy is to stick with one productivity suite as a way to avoid these interoperability problems. That way, even if formula support is idiosyncratic, it at least will be consistent within the enterprise.
Well said.
Comments
Ho hum. Been here before. When is an standard not a useful standard? When it is defined by a single "reference" code base! Hence the IETF Mantra "Rough Consensus and Running Code (>=2 implementations)".
Even then, it never ceases to amaze me that the Internet's email infrastructure works as well as it does given the differing interpretations of different implementations. Examples: is "QUIT" mandatory? What are the semantics of "Reply to:" ...
Nick Shelness, 2009-05-08
