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Data Exchange

The Monopoly

Nowadays most word processing-, spreadsheet- and presentation documents are exchanged in MS-Office file-formats. But why is this?
Well, due to blackmailer-like marketing, Microsoft has became the market leader for desktop operating systems, browsers and office-suites. This fact forces enterprises and public buildings to sign expensive license contracts. In order to to avoid this, private persons can install illegal copies of the programs but they forget that they can be punished. Microsoft has tolerated these illegal copies until the MS-programs have spread and now Microsoft can increase the prices as much as they want.

The Change

No wonder that more and more are looking for alternatives and changing to them. On CeBIT 2002 [en|de] I - as representative of OpenOffice.org - could talk to these people and advise them.
As this change has been realized, some problems with the data exchange to MS-Office users has become apparent, since special filters are required. These filters can only be used until Microsoft changes the file structure. This could only be the latest solution for the problem since there will always be a loss of information due to the fact that Microsoft does not publish the specification of their file structures properly. Thus, the documents are only readable with exactly the same program that was used by the creator; and do not forget: On Windows you have to install the same printer driver and the same fonts, otherwise there will be differences. I cannot use MS-Office since it only runs on Windows and Mac OS, which I do not use for several reasons. And besides, I would not pay $600 for this!
The intentions of Microsoft are quite clear: Keeping the file structure secret, the amount of sales should be assured: If the file structure were open, it would not be difficult to create filters for all the other programs and the flow of information could be realized - independent of the program and operating system. Competition is impeded and a monopoly still exists:

• Microsoft dictates the prices of the office-suites
• users are forced to use MS-Office since the other users do - a vicious circle
• users cannot check the data that is embedded in their documents: name, email-address, and any changes in the document including the user who has made them
• on the other hand users cannot be sure that the document has no virues or worms
• users have to store the work in a file format that may be non-existent in ten years

A Solution

What can you do to escape from this vicious circle?
You can save documents in open file formats as is common to do for images. Everybody knows JPG, GIF or PNG. Due to the fact that they are open everybody can open, edit and save. It does not matter which program has been used to create it: Paint Shop Pro on Windows in 2002, Photoshop on the Mac in 1999 or the Gimp on Linux in 1997!
It is quite similar to the internet since it is based on a lot of open protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP, IMAP etc) and file formats (HTML, SGML, XML etc). They made the internet as successful as it is today.
For word processing documents you can use RTF, plain-text or HTML. But using these file formats, not all of the format information can be saved. An interessting alternative is LaTeX that is based on plain text files. If these text files are saved in sensible encodings like ISO-8859-1 or UTF one can also exchange documents written in non-english languages.
If you want to exchange data that the recipient should only look at or print and should not edit, Adobe's PDF is a good choice since its file structure is published and there are a lot of programs that can create and display PDF-files. Of course, there are programs that are free of charge. This manual [en] describes an installation of such a PDF-creator on Windows.
If you want to exchange documents that are going to be edited you need a program that has an open file structure [en] such as OpenOffice.org that contains word processing-, spreadsheet- and presentation-tools and many more. Its features are comparable to MS-Office and especially the word processing-tool, which is much better than MS-Word.
OpenOffice.org has the best MS-Office filters, except for MS-Office itself, and this make file exchange quite easy.
Meanwhile, a standardization group consisting of persons from firms like Sun Microsystems, Boing, Corel and IBM worked on a document standard that is based on the XML format of OpenOffice.org1. In May of 2005 they approved this standard as OpenDocument standard [en]. This standard includes text-, table- and presentation-documents. This standard is supported by the European Comission and was approved as ISO standard in May of 2006. The OpenDocument standard is used as default file format by OpenOffice.org 2 and KOffice 1.5. Have a look at the pages of the Open Document Fellopship [en] in order to see which applications do also support the Open Document Format.