It seems like a lot of european countries have started becoming more concerned with digital sovereignty and some have begun enforcing using open formats like ODF / ODS
I’m struggling to find support though. A lot of software seems to open ODS files but force the XLSX format on save.
I’d expect something like OnlyOffice to have support since it’s used by the French government and the government of their German neighbours is enforcing ODS usage + there should be a reasonable library they could import to make it work without a large overhead
OpenOffice and libreoffice are a few that support ODF/ODT files.
Yeah, I quite like libreoffice on the mac but I’m not always on my mac. I kind of thought one of the European cloud storage providers might offer support for editing too but they auto convert to Microsoft formats during edit and that just seems like it would be more error prone. And on an iPhone I only found one app that would edit in place, everything else views or converts to Microsoft formats
But that’s kind of the problem. If it’s only supported in one or two apps, is it really an open format?
For example, I use Libre Office on my laptop. However the printer driver for my printer is no longer supported and Microsoft keeps installing a broken one over the one that works. I can no longer reliably print from my laptop.
But printing from my iPhone has been flawless for years. But if I try to look up how to edit and print open document format on my iPhone, the answer is “Microsoft Word”. How is the “open” format not supported, and why do I need to switch to a proprietary format?
Microsoft had an almost total stranglehold on Office productivity software for about 3 decades, only their formats really mattered. I think they still have over 3/4 of business & enterprise market share.
Google’s productivity suite is probably in 2nd place in terms of usage today (much more popular than office outside of business) which I believe doesn’t have an external file format, followed by either LibreOffice (via OpenOffice, the originator of ODF) or maybe even the Apple suite.
Essentially the support isn’t super ubiquitous because, especially until recently, the percentage of documents created in that format is quite small compared to the Microsoft formats
I vaguely remember reading an article about Microsoft fully supporting the creation of ODF but only to influence its direction towards being a convuluted and limited document format so they could both argue they weren’t a monopoly and ensure their monopoly
Yeah, I get why Microsofts formats are entrenched
I don’t so much get why they aren’t mostly export formats since:
- A proprietary format seems like it would be more error prone to use as the only format you edit documents in
- I presumed there would be some overhead like fees to using microsoft formats
- With governments caring more about digital sovereignty, I thought there would be better placed suppliers
I guess #3 will just take time and to them there is risk that Trump leaves and everyone goes back to Microsoft
Oh, I feel like I’ve gotta let you know the (post 2003/7?) Microsoft formats are technically “open” in that the spec is available for anyone to implement, license free
They saw ODF coming and made sure to kneecap any advantage
#3 is an incredibly recent development. You don’t need to go back even half a decade before everyone was happily gargling Microsoft
not that microsoft actually follows those standards 100%.
Ah! They are open? Partly my bad then. I also wondered if ODF was written in a way that prohibited online collaboration, or at least made it very expensive.
Yeah, on #3 I think I misremembered how far back France started using open source. Hopefully this means more ODF native options
LIBREOFFICE
Format support is available in all the software for which it is the native format. And the people who use those documents have that software, so support elsewhere doesn’t matter that much.
Sure for isolated machines. I was using open office on isolated machines 20 years ago, I’m glad the software is better now.
But there is value in cloud storage for institutions and collaborative editing. All the European offerings I saw for this were autoconverting to Microsoft formats (pcloud, onlyoffice) and they both seem to have at least part open source licenses so it’s surprising to me.
Its also surprising to me that there are mostly viewing options on iPhone (but not surprising to me that there is low support, just that it’s almost only view only)
