ODF-implementation in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2

So once again here I am – waiting for a connecting flight out of Frankfurt, Germany. There is about an hour and a half to my flight to Seattle where I will attend the Microsoft ODF DII-workshop about Microsoft’s implementation of ODF in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2. I am looking forward to seeing what they have accomplished and especially for the hands-on lab on Wednesday afternoon, where we will have the opportunity of testing our own documents to see the quality of the implementation. I have therefore brought my own little “tool-box” of documents to test in the lab. Since we were not required to sign any NDAs, I will try do document my tests as good as I can and post them on my blog ASAP. I hope they will be able to contribute to the on-going discussions taking place.

Of course, there are tons of different parameters to test, and it will be impossible for us to test them all, but a few areas do indeed deserve some attention, because these have traditionally been the areas causing most trouble. A non-exhaustive list would be

• ODF-files with embedded objects
  •  MathML
  • Spreadsheets
  • Presentations
  • Binary objects
• Inline embedding of MathML-fragments (just for the fun of it)
• ODF Drawing (vector graphics)
• Numbering
• Formulas in spreadsheets
• Handling of anchoring of graphics and other document parts
• Conversion from OOXML to ODF
  • OMML
  • DrawingML
  • VML
  • Embedded objects
• XForms
• Custom XML
• clip-board content

The list above (apart from the latter three) nicely summarizes the problems we encountered when I participated in the work for the Danish Government (National Agency of IT and Telecommunications) in Fall 2007 about application interoperability between ODF and OOXML. I hope these tests will be able to contribute to the on-going discussions here in Denmark as well.

Another interesting thing to see will be how Microsoft has handled the various application-specific parts of ODF. How have they handled formulas in spreadsheets? How have they handled document protection of document parts? How have they handled the application-specific content in the <config-item-set>-elements of the other implementations? These are not trivial questions and they directly impact interoperability with other implementations of ODF.

I think it will be an interesting day tomorrow – and I’ll keep you posted on the progress. If you have any last-minute ideas and suggestions to what I should test, please write me an email or simply post a comment to this post. If you have files you’d like me to test, send them to me as well. You can use the “Contact” form on this blog to do so.