ODF Vs. OOXML File Counts On the Web

mrcgran writes "In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are fewer than 2,000 of these office documents posted on the Web. In the last three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the Web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added. It would be hard for the Microsoft camp to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents, especially since 34% of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com. That isn't what I would call good traction for Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant office suite."

Re:Microsoft is competing with itself

[hairpinred]

I personally have found that when trying to open old DOC format files that OpenOffice.org does a much better job than the latest version of Word does.

Especially if you have any legacy Word 1.0 or 2.0 documents that can't be upgraded to the latest format for contractual reasons - Office 2007 will not open those files correctly, and those files are officially unsupported by Microsoft.

I'm surprised that more people don't just use .ODF, it's a published, open standard that is as trivial to write a parser for as it is to just unzip the file and look at the XML directly...

Re:What they need to do

[Anonymous Coward]

It would appear that this concept does *not* go over their head. What you're talking about is the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats" and it's been out since June:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa ylang=en [microsoft.com]

BTW, it works with Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000

Re:Microsoft is competing with itself

[phoenixwade]

Especially if you have any legacy Word 1.0 or 2.0 documents that can't be upgraded to the latest format for contractual reasons
Offtopic, but I'm just too curious... Would it be possible to explain why these can't be migrated to a newer format? I'd think that'd be dangerously unwise.

I'm not sure of the parent poster, but we have some electronic documents that are archived from 10 years ago that can't be updated and then re-archived, they must match the printed documents that they produced. We can, and do, convert to a new(er) format when updating a document to be submitted and published now, and to allow those documents to be searched, but the ability to open documents from years ago is critical for one of our customers. We got the job because we were willing to dedicate a system to retrieve those documents in the original format.

My recommendation was to handle those archives very differently. This client has a decision maker who knows what he wants, and dictates that it is either done that way, or he'll find someone else to do it. So we do it that way, and every year, I make a case for becoming more current, and every year, the answer is no. I don't mind, though, he's paying for the service, and other than this little bit of fear, he's really easy to work with, I've certainly had far more progressive clients that were far more of a PITA.

Office Compatiblity Addon for Old Versions

[antdude]

See here [microsoft.com] and you can save as Office 2007 formats for old Office versions (as long as they have this pack). I also noticed MS keep them updated through Office Update and I still use Office 2000 SP3.