Will you be my friend too?
The other day I noticed that the traffic on my blog had increased dramatically. I couldn’t really understand why (I have not written anything substantial in quite some time) – all I could see was that...
View ArticleODF 1.2 in ISO (PAS-submission)
The other day a document landed on my "desk" in the Danish Mirror committee to JTC1 SC34. It was the document ”EXPLANATORY REPORT - OASIS Submission of OpenDocument v1.2 to ISO/IEC JTC 1 [JTC1...
View ArticleOpenXml SDK released as OSS
Yesterday I was notified that the OpenXml SDK had been released as an Open Source Project by Microsoft.Back in summer 2008 I attended a workshop in Redmond, WA regarding the future support of OOXML and...
View ArticleEEE - the SC34-way
In my recent post about the outcome of the AHG1-meeting in London, IBM's Rob Weir pointed out, that What everyone is missing is the fact that Microsoft is not obligated to participate in SC34/WG4...
View ArticleODF-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...
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Generated by Microsoft Office 2007
As we are testing the various test ODF-files we/I have brought to the Microsoft DII workshop here in Redmond, I stumpled over the following XML-fragment: [code=xml]<office:document-meta...
View ArticleDII ODF workshop catch-up
Wow - it seems the entire cast of Microsoftbloggers are laying the grounds for a whole bunch of blog-entries after the DII-workshop in Redmond the day before yesterday (Wednesday July 30th). So OK -...
View ArticleDII-workshop in Redmond - round-table discussions
... continued from DII ODF workshop catchup. The last part of the afternoon in Redmond was a round-table discussion of standards in general; what to do with them and how to work with them in terms of...
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Are document formats silver-bullets?
A new study from the University of Illinois College of Law has made its way to cyberspace. The title is "Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards - ODF and OOXML as Examples"...
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ODF 1.0 Errata 01 released
Yesterday the official Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 Errata 01 was released for public feedback. The email in part says thatThe public review starts today, 7 August...
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ISO says: continue with ISO/IEC 29500
This just in ... The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after...
View ArticleDII ODF workshop - the good stuff
... continued from DII-workshop in Redmond - round-table discussions. So - let's get down to what was the real purpose of going to Redmond - apart from the great breakfast I had at Lowell's in...
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Microsoft, its time to deliver
Just before OOXML was approved in JTC1/SC34, a lot of us spent a lot of time discussing the differences of between Sun's CNS, IBM's ISP and Microsoft's OSP. Specifically, a thread on Oliver Bell's...
View ArticleDay one of IS29500?
On August 15th 2008 ISO/IEC gave their "Go ahead" on the appeal against the IS29500-approval and the process leading to it. The decision was covered almost everywhere and the phrase that caused the...
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IS 29500 has been sent to ITTF for publication
This email just landed in my mailbox this morning:ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 N1080Final Text for ISO/IEC 29500-1, Information technology --Document description and processing languages -- Office OpenXML File...
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JTC1/SC34 WG4 appointed Danish expert
On Friday, October 24th the Danish mirror-committee to JTC1/SC34 had its bi-monthly meeting. On the agenda was, amongst other things, assignment of participants to the newly created working groups in...
View ArticleMicrosoft Office 2007 - now with ODF-support
On October 22nd a long awaited email popped into my mailbox - news of the release of first beta of Microsoft Office 2007 SP2. The reason for me longing to get my hands on this piece of software (and...
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ISO publishes OOXML
ISO today decided to make OOXML ISO-edition (IS29500:2008) publically available. You can choose to purchase a physical print of the specification or you can download it for free at the ITTF website....
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What's up Japan!
Jeeez ... has it been a long time since I last wrote a blog-entry here. It's not so much that I didn't want to write something ... but I have found myself pre-occupied with other tasks at the grinding...
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The complexity of SpreadsheetML - oh the sheer joy of it!
Having a bit of time on my hands while attending the SC34/WG4-meeting in Okinawa, I thought I'd write up a blog post I have wanted to write in quite some time.The reason for me doing this was a...
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Post WG4-meetings in Okinawa
Last week (week 4 of 2009) we had the first face-2-face meeting in SC34/WG4 on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Since there is quite a big overlap between the participants of WG4 and those of WG5, the...
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Versioning of OOXML (thank you for all the fish)
One of the most pressing matters we had to deal with in Okinawa was a question raised by quite a few people including members of the national body of Switzerland as well as hAl on the blogs of Alex...
View ArticleStruck by the Wrath of Roy "Kahn" Schestowitz
As the real work of maintaining OOXML in ISO has begun, I have had some time to ponder over events throughout the last year - starting with the BRM in Geneva in February 2008. Being in Geneva was...
View ArticleOASIS to JTC1: Bye, bye ...
Ever since the hoola about OOXML-approval there has been quite some discontent in the ISO community regarding how ODF TC has fulfilled its obligations after IS26300 approval. A few meetings have taken...
View ArticleWG4 meetings in Prague
Wow – this has been a tough week. I arrived at the hotel here in Prague (I am currently waiting in Prague Airport for my flight back to Copenhagen) at around 21:00. I met Doug in Copenhagen and flew...
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Maintenance of IS26300 in SC34
The streets of Prague are buzzing with rumours coming out of the work in the working groups of SC34 and SC34 itself as SC34 is currently having its plenary meeting in Prague. It seems that SC34 has...
View ArticleThe actual work we did in Prague
I thought I’d try to outline a bit what we actually did and what constituted our work in Prague. The agenda framing our work throughout these three days was this:Opening 2009-03-24 09:00Roll call of...
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Losing data the silent way - ISO8601-dates
In Prague we spent quite some time discussing how to deal with the fact that applications supporting ECMA-376 1st Ed. not necessarily support ISO/IEC 29500:2008 strict as well. Our talks revolved...
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Lo(o)sing data the silent way - all the rest of it
Ok - this post is going to be soooo different than what I had envisioned. I had prepared documents for "object embedding" and "document protection" but when I started testing them, I soon realized that...
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IBM: Thumbs up for OOXML!
Today news broke that ANSI (the US national standardisation guys) recently voted on the subject of approving OOXML as an "American National Standard". The text of the ballot was: Approval to Adopt the...
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Markup compatibility and extensibility (MCE)
Part 3 of ISO/IEC 29500 is the fun part and if you haven’t read it yet, you really should do so – especially if you are thinking about implementing an IS29500-document consumer. Part 3 basically...
View ArticleExtending OOXML
This article will have to topics - one about extending OOXML using the built-in extension mechanisms and one about extending OOXML itself.Using built-in mechanisms As I have written about earlier...
View ArticleIs "interoperability" a transitive characteristic?
Way back when I was a math-major at university, we were taught about "operations on sets". A set could simply be "the natural numbers", which could be defined as all positive integers including the...
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WG4-meetings in Copenhagen
So ... everyone on the "who's who" list of OOXML maintenance is in Copenhagen eagerly working our way through a zillion defect reports and proposals for IS29500. The pace varies from hour to hour, but...
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Re-introducing on/off-values to ST-OnOff in OOXML Part 4
At this very moment we are discussing re-introducing the values on/off to the simple type ST_OnOff in the transitional part of OOXML.Background: Some countries (including Denmark and UK) argued during...
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Microsoft-stacking in WG4
Traditionally, for every meeting we have in WG4, some conspiracy-theory is born on how much money the delegates received from Microsoft, how many sports-cars we each got from Microsoft or how we each...
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Norway mandates PDF and ODF as exchange-formats
Norway has mandated use of PDF and/or ODF as document exchange formats. The baseline reference list of approved standards and formats has been released in a "version 2.0"-edition where, amongst other...
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Danish Competition Authority suggests: Use ODF in public sector!
Get the information straight from the horse's mouth from DCA website. If you are not speaking Danish, Google will do a rough translation for you.I'll update this article shortly ...... oh ... and I...
View ArticleDenmark votes "yes" on IS29500 COR1 and FPDAM1
I know it has been a couple of weeks, but I just wanted to share current development with you.On September 7th (in Danish), the Danish mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 met at Danish Standards in...
View ArticleMicrosoft Office 2010 CTP1 TODO-list (Teaser)
It seems about time somebody wrote a bit about how Microsoft has chosen to implement ISO/IEC 29500:2008, aka OOXML. As you might know, Microsoft claims that Microsoft Office 2010 will implement “29500”...
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Mummy, Tom from school is an idiot
Back in the day when I started blogging, I showed a friend of mine a blog post I had written. He noticed the large number of links to other bloggers in the piece, and he asked me (tongue-in-cheek) if...
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Excel 2010 (Microsoft Office 2010 CTP TO-do list (01)
I have been looking at how Excel 2010 has implemented various features using ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 - also known as "OOXML Transitional".Background:ISO/IEC comes in two variants, a "transitional" (T) and...
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I hate automatic spam filtering
Every time you use a tool, you make a (conscious) decision to trust that tool to do what it says. This is true for closed source software and open source software alike (especially if you don't have...
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test
[code:xml]<o:OLEObject Type="Embed" ProgID="AVIFile" ObjectID="_1219561732" r:id="rId5"/>[/code]
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Microsoft Office 2010 Beta, ODF and leap-year-bug
Some time ago I did some tests of Excel in Microsoft Office 2010 (CTP). The test was around OOXML - but test of ODF-support was missing.One of the things ODF is missing but is in OOXML is the...
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Moving towards OOXML(S)
Some time ago I wrote a bit about what Microsoft Office had managed to get into Microsoft Office 2010 CTP1 (or, I wrote about the stuff I had tested). As you might recall, the results were rather slim,...
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Final nail in the coffin for the "highlander approach"
On January 29th the Danish politicians finally got their acts together and did something about open document formats. After almost 3 years of debate and endless dragging of their feet - a consensus and...
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Validating OOXML documents
The question of “is this a valid document?” is tricky. At the end of the day it comes down to the description in the conformance clauses of the specification of the document being considered. The...
View ArticleCorrect according to spec or implementation?
In the recent SC34 WG4-meeting in Stockholm, validators quickly became the talk of the town - so to speak. As I am sure you all know, Alex Brown made the office-o-tron some time ago - a validator...
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Moving towards OOXML(S) (update)
Some time ago I wrote about some of the enhancements of Microsoft Office in terms of how far they have made it in implementing the content of the conformance profile "Strict" or "<S>". As you...
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