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From: Regina Henschel on 14 Apr 2010 13:14
Hi all,

I thing, not all of you are familiar with the problem. So I will try to
explain the situation.

OOo uses for its documents the ODF standard. But this standard has no
unique form of formula language, but allows different ones. Those are
distinguished be a so called namespace. OOo uses the namespace "of", but
Excel 2010 uses the namespace "msoxl". So we have the situation, that
both ods-files are valid ODF-documents, but use different ways for
storing the formulas.

Currently we have this interoperability behaviour:

Excel 2010 can write and read its own ods-documents. So everyone can use
Excel and meet the demand for an open standard.

Excel 2010 reads OOo-ods documents in a way, that it does not use the
formulas but show the values as they were saved by OOo. When changing
something and saving again, it contains no longer any of the formulas,
but only the values.

OOo can read ods-documents made by Excel 2010. It translates those
formulas, that have a suitable counterpart in the "of" namespace to the
corresponding formula and sets namespace "of". But it ignores the values
of the other formulas and replaces them with a #NAME? value and
exchanges "msoxl" with "of", although those formulas are not contained
in namespace "of".

The effect is, that users cannot exchange valid ods-documents between
Excel and OOo, when they want to change something. And OOo-users cannot
even read the values of those documents.

I want to discuss it here, because I do not like the current behavior of
OOo.

My ideas are for example:
A
Open documents with "msoxl"-namespace with a warning, that the document
uses an alien formula language and offer the ability to
(1) open it readonly, showing the stored values
(2) open it with trying to translate the formulas and inform the user to
look for #Name? warnings where translation not possible.

B
Extend the interpreter, so that it is able to calculate "msoxl"-formulas.

C
Remember that the document has "msoxl"-formulas and offer the user to
save in that namespace where it is possible; especially do not change
the namespace for those formulas, that have no counterpart in "of".

Do you have other ideas? What are your opinion for this interoperability
problem?

kind regards
Regina



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