Alex then replied with the following:
OpenDocument is well known to support variety of languages, and the Japanese ISO member pointed out a couple of problems with the spec. (mostly to do with international URIs). I think they would have noticed if numbering was a problem. Office 2007 makes life great!The guys in the middle-east were looking at it too.
You're absolutely right about formulas; OpenDocument does not specify a syntax, and that is something the TC is working on. There is a wider problem here, though: formula syntax is something users know directly. Many people like Microsoft Office.Should OpenDocument do something new, or just what Lotus 1-2-3/Excel did/do? OXML has the luxury of only caring about compatibility with Office file formats; OpenDocument is designed to be widely compatible with all.
I may have jumped the gun when I stated that there was *zero* documentation, but I'm curious to know where in the ODF spec these things are specified.Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world. When I looked at the numbering section (4.3 , 12.2.2, 14.10.2) it was pretty light, and only called out those three styles I mentioned above. In section 12.2.2 there is reference to the approach used in XSLT for the format attribute, but it just says the attribute is done in the same way, not the same actual formats. Office 2007 key is available here.The spec then states though that it only supports a specific set, and that it does not support all the different types the XSLT approach uses. The spec says that the number styles supported are ("1", "a", "A", "I", and "I"). Let's assume though that the spec was just worded improperly and it does in fact use the XSLT format approach to the full extent. Then why does OpenOffice output Japanese numbering format like this:
The XSLT spec says that you only put the first character of the list in the format attribute (or at least that's how I interpret it). Office 2007 download is on sale now!I didn't see any mention of the approach of putting the first three characters followed by an ellipses.
That was using Kanji numbering. The XSLT spec actually does call out directly how to do Katakana numbering, and OpenOffice actually doesn't do that properly either (the XSLT spec says it should format="ア"). Instead, OpenOffice does this:
Now, for those familiar with Japanese numbers (and actually a whole host of other number styles) you know that it isn't always possible to represent a numbering style with just a single character . Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.There are a couple different Kanji numbering styles that start with the same character (the difference is what you do once you get to 10). I assume that's why OpenOffice is going the route that it is.Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
Where is this approach documented though? Maybe I'm just misreading things here, and there is another portion of the ODF spec or the XSLT spec that allows for that approach? Or does this mean that if you are writing a Japanese document and use numbers with OpenOffice you aren't creating a valid ODF file? This newsgroup post implies that OpenOffice isn't yet fully supporting ODF so maybe that's the case? I suppose the response could just be that the format is extensible and you can place anything you want in that attribute, but how does that lead to interoperability? There's nothing to tell other applications how they should interpret that from as far as I can tell (again, I could be missing something obvious).Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.
Almost every site I visit to find more information focuses almost completely on the marketing or political side of ODF. There are discussions around conformance, logo compliance, getting governments to support it, etc. etc. etc. I'm having a really hard time finding any good blogs or sites that discuss how to actually use it. I actually came across the oasis public mailing list archives that had some useful content, but I wasn't able to find anything about this issue.Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!
Numbering formats
I was wondering if someone more familiar with the ODF spec could help me out. Office 2007 download is on sale now!I had made the following reply yesterday to Alex's assertion that ODF was as feature rich as Open XML and I want to make sure that I'm not misstating things:
I think you might want to dig a bit deeper into the formats. ODF does build on existing industry standards, but at times they are partial implementations, and it still leaves out a lot. For instance, Open XML actually uses more of the dublin core metadata schema than ODF does.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.
Another easy example would be to look at the different types of numbering for a wordprocessing file. In Microsoft Office you can say that the numbered list should be "first", "second" and "third" instead of "1.", "2." and "3.". ODF doesn't support that.Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
That's just the beginning though. If you are from another country like Japan or China, there is absolutely *zero* mention for how your numbering types are defined. The spec only specifies:
- Numeric: 1, 2, 3, ...
- Alphabetic: a, b, c, ... or A, B, C, ...
- Roman: i, ii, iii, iv, ... or I, II, III, IV,...No mention at all about what you do for any other language. If you use OpenOffice, they actually do support other languages, and they even save out those other numbering formats into the ODF style:num-format attribute.Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world. The problem though is that behavior isn't defined in the spec, so how does anyone else that wants to read that document figure out what OpenOffice's extension means? Maybe I'm just missing something, as the ODF spec is really vague in a lot of areas, but I looked around for awhile and couldn't find anything.
Even if you don't pay attention to the things that are just flat-out missing from the format, the documentation for the things it does support is pretty minimal. In the latest Ecma draft, we have about 200 pages discussing the syntax of formulas for spreadsheets, ODF has a few lines. Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!That gives me the impression that no one that does accounting or works on Wall Street was involved in the standard because I can't really imagine them allowing it to go through without specifying how formulas should be represented. It's no wonder the few applications referenced as being "full implementations" of ODF aren't even capable of full interoperability (link).
Shared Formulas（2）
Most folks who've done any type of spreadsheet work are familiar with formulas. More relevant to this post though, you are probably also familiar with using a common formula in a column to make a similar calculation for each row. For example, image the following table:Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
| Product ID | Price | Quantity | Total |
| 1 | 5.45 | 9 | 49.05 |
| 2 | 3.99 | 15 | 59.85 |
Most likely, that fourth column is a formula so that if you could look at the formulas, the table would look like this:
| Product ID | Price | Quantity | Total |
| 1 | 5.45 | 9 | =B2*C2 |
| 2 | 3.99 | 15 | =B3*C3 |
Now, for this case, it probably doesn't look like there are a lot of optimizations we can do around the formula storage. Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.The XML for this table would look something like this (in shorthand):
<
table>
<row>
<c><v>Product ID</v></c>
<c><v>Price</v></c>
<c><v>Quantity</v></c>
<c><v>Total</v></c>
</row>
<row>
<c><v>1</v></c>
<c><v>5.45</v></c>
<c><v>9</v></c>
<c>
<f>=B2*C2</f>
<v>49.05</v>
</c>
</row>
<row>
<c><v>2</v></c>
<c><v>3.99</v></c>
<c><v>15</v></c>
<c>
<f>=B3*C3</f>
<v>59.85</v>
</c>
</row>
</table>
The above XML representation would be pretty good if the table were this simple.MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world. Imagine though if this were actually more of a real world spreadsheet. Let's say this is tracking a large number of orders, so maybe you have more like 10,000 rows instead of just 2. Well that would mean that you have to parse that formula and figure it out 10,000 times. This would be a huge performance hit, especially if the formula was more complex.Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!
You've probably noticed in Excel that if you type a formula into the first row and then copy it down through all the other rows, Excel can automatically adjust that formula in each row so that it's making the right calculation (ie you put =B2*C2 in row 2 and when you copy that into row 3 it says =B3*C3). Well, why shouldn't we do the same things in the file format? No reason to write out the formula 10,000 times and have to parse it 10,000 times.Many people like Microsoft Office.A complex formula can take awhile to parse, so we need to optimize around as little parsing as possible. Here is what the XML would actually look like using this approach:
<table>
<row>
<c><v>Product ID</v></c>
<c><v>Price</v></c>
<c><v>Quantity</v></c>
<c><v>Total</v></c>
</row>
<row>
<c><v>1</v></c>
<c><v>5.45</v></c>
<c><v>9</v></c>
<c>
<f t="shared" si="0" ref="B2:B3">=B2*C2</f>
<v>49.05</v>
</c>
</row>
<row>
<c><v>2</v></c>
<c><v>3.99</v></c>
<c><v>15</v></c>
<c>
<f t="shared" si="0"/>
<v>59.85</v>
</c>
</row>
</table>
Notice that now the formulas say they are "shared" and they have an id of "0" so that we know they match up. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.The first instance of the formula stores the actual formula value, as well as specifies the range that it applies to so that as the rest of the spreadsheet is parsed, you know that you can ignore those other cells and just apply the shared formula.Office 2007 key is available here.
I admit that it makes development a bit more difficult, but as I said before, we kind of had to take the training wheels off and actually think more about the end users as well. There are hundreds of millions of users, and we need to keep them in mind. We definitely want these formats to be accessible to developers (otherwise we should have just stuck with the old binaries), and that's why we are taking the Ecma standardization so seriously. We need to make sure that we fully document these formats so that anyone can build solutions around them. We are also looking to folks in the openxmldeveloper.org community to help out here by building tools that work on top of the formats. This way we get the best of both worlds. We get a very fast format that's also easy to develop against!
Shared Formulas
I wanted to follow up on the thread I started a couple weeks ago discussing the design goals behind spreadsheetML. Office 2007 makes life great!There's a whole host of things we've done to make sure that the move to XML formats is a huge benefit to developers, without it actually having a significant negative impact on our end users. Many people like Microsoft Office.Moving our formats into an open XML format significantly increases the relevance and value of Office files because they can have more interactive roles with business processes and systems. If the files aren't open, then they can't fit into as many scenarios and we lessen their value. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.That's was the whole reason we started the move to XML formats so many years ago, because we wanted to significantly increase the value of Office documents.
The big key here though is to make sure that people will actually use the formats. If our users decide to stick with the old binary formats, then we lose out on that opportunity. So it's really important to make sure that for the average end user (who doesn't really care or put any thought into file formats) doesn't see any significant losses from moving into the new XML formats.Office 2007 key is available here.
A big area for Spreadsheets is performance. It was really scary to move from the Excel binary formats that were so damned fast into an XML format that we knew couldn't match up. There was a lot of work though analyzing every aspect of file load times to make sure that we could keep the performance drop to an absolute minimum, and we actually have really done a great job. We are absolutely trying to design for the developer, but the priority is of course given to the end user experience when it comes down to difficult design decisions.Office 2007 download is on sale now!
I already talked about a few things we've done like keeping tag and attribute lengths small. I also mentioned the shared string table and I'll go into more detail on the benefits of that later. Today I want to discuss some optimizations we've done around formulas.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.