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Microsoft Open XML embarrassment: spaces go missing between words

By tim, on February 23rd, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format, now officially called just Open XML*, has an embarrassing bug in its Office 2010 and/or Office 2007 implementation, as reported by Dennis O’Reilly on Cnet.

In a nutshell: if you save a document from Word 2010 using the default .docx format, and send it to a user with Word

…continue reading Microsoft Open XML embarrassment: spaces go missing between words

Office Web Apps better then Open Office for .docx on Linux

By tim, on April 30th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve been reviewing Office and SharePoint 2010, and trying out Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, so I thought I would put the two together with a small experiment.

I borrowed a document from Microsoft’s press materials for Office 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, they are in .doc format, not the Open XML .docx that was introduced in Office 2007.

…continue reading Office Web Apps better then Open Office for .docx on Linux

Office 2010 offers choice of Open Document or Microsoft XML formats

By tim, on April 23rd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I was surprised to see the following dialog after an in-place upgrade of Office 2007 to Office 2010:

Admittedly there is a strong steer towards the Microsoft formats which, we are told, are “designed to support all the features of Microsoft Office”.

On the other hand, this was an in-place upgrade and default

…continue reading Office 2010 offers choice of Open Document or Microsoft XML formats

Dancing on a pin: Microsoft belatedly answers Open XML critics

By tim, on April 8th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Doug Mahugh has replied to accusations from ISO expert Alex Brown that the company is doing little to implement its own Open XML standard. The issue is that the XML document formats in Office 2007 are, from the ISO perspective, meant to be “Transitional” – a compromised format designed to interoperate with existing binary

…continue reading Dancing on a pin: Microsoft belatedly answers Open XML critics

Microsoft accused of failure to observe Open XML standards process

By tim, on April 1st, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

XML specialist Alex Brown, who was involved in the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Open XML – still perhaps best known as OOXML – says Microsoft has failed to honour the commitments it made when the standard was approved. In particular, it seems little progress has been made between Office 2007 and Office 2010. The key

…continue reading Microsoft accused of failure to observe Open XML standards process

More patent nonsense: Microsoft loses in Office custom XML appeal

By tim, on December 23rd, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has lost its appeal in a case where a small company called i4i claims that Office 2003 and 2007 infringes its patent on embedding custom XML within a Word document. This is not the XML that defines the content and layout of the document. It is XML contained within the document that Word itself

…continue reading More patent nonsense: Microsoft loses in Office custom XML appeal

Docx on a Mac: still rough without Microsoft Word

By tim, on September 2nd, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve been living on a Mac recently, while thoroughly investigating the new Snow Leopard. One of the questions that interests me: how difficult is it to use a Mac in a Windows-centric environment? Once facet of this is Microsoft’s latest document formats, introduced with Office 2007: docx, xlsx and pptx. What if you get sent

…continue reading Docx on a Mac: still rough without Microsoft Word

OpenDocument comes to Microsoft Word and Excel

By tim, on April 30th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

After the intense interest in OOXML vs ODF during last year’s ISO document standardisation wars, I’m surprised that the inclusion of OpenDocument support in the newly-released Office 2007 SP2 has attracted so little attention. Well, not really surprised. The general public doesn’t care much about document formats as such, just that the documents they send

…continue reading OpenDocument comes to Microsoft Word and Excel

More OOXML than ODF on the Internet, according to Google

By tim, on September 24th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

In May 2007, IBM’s Rob Weir made a point of how few of Microsoft’s Office Open XML documents were available on the Internet. Here are his figures from back then:

odt 85,200 ods 20,700 odp 43,400 Total ODF 149,300

docx 471 xlsx 63 pptx 69 Total OOXML 603

The

…continue reading More OOXML than ODF on the Internet, according to Google

10 things you might not have known about XAML

By tim, on September 2nd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve written a short piece on XAML for the Register. Here’s a few things you might not have known about Microsoft’s Extensible Application Markup Language:

1. It is not just for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation); it is also used as a language for Workflow Foundation (WF). Microsoft has hinted that we will see more XAML

…continue reading 10 things you might not have known about XAML

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