16/12/2018 Why you should not use Microsoft Office!

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Why you should never use Microsoft’s

OOXML pseudo-standard format
Italo Vignoli talks about the dirty tricks Microsoft uses to break
interoperability and keep users locked into their platform.

By Swapnil Bhartiya - November 29, 2014

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T
he UK government recently announced that they would use ISO approved document standard
ODF for viewing and sharing government documents. It’s a very important move because it
breaks Microso ’s vendor lock where single US-based company �?owns’ and �?controls’ all the
documents created on Earth. Microso is infamous for using unethical means to make it harder for other
players to o er any kind of interoperability with their products which can threaten Microso ’s market
share.

So we reached out to Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation, the organization responsible for
developing LibreO ice which is a fork of OpenO ice, to understand the risks of using OOXML…

Swapnil Bhartiya: What are the practical and technological problems by using Microso ’s products
or the OOXML format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX extensions).
Italo Vignoli: MS O ice locks-in the user not only with proprietary formats but also with the OOXML
pseudo-standard format. This is due to the way the supposedly standard format is handled by MS O ice.

In fact, each version of MS O ice since 2007 has a di erent and non standard implementation of OOXML,
which is defined as “transitional” because it contains elements which are supposed to be deprecated at
standard level, but are still there for compatibility reasons.

Although LibreO ice manages to read and write OOXML in a fairly appropriate way, it will be impossible
to achieve a perfect interoperability because of these di erent non standard versions.
In addition to format incompatibilities, Microso – with OOXML – has introduced elements which may
lead the user into producing a non interoperable document, such as the C-Fonts (for instance, Calibri and
Cambria).

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C-Fonts are the default choice for MS O ice documents, but their license APR JUN
forbids users of other👤o ice
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suites to adopt them for any document (as you must own a Microso O2016
ice license).
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So, a LibreO ice user who receives an OOXML document will be able to open it properly, but the
document will not look the same because the C-Font will be automatically replaced by another font.

Most of the times, the LibreO ice user will think that the document does not look the same because of
LibreO ice and not because Microso intentionally induced him into this “visual incompatibility”.

So, using MS O ice with the native OOXML format is a problem for everyone, and the more people are
using OOXML the more non standard documents will be around.

Swapnil: OOXML was approved “illegally” as an ISO standard, despite ODF being already a
standard. How much of OOXML specifications are used in Microso ’s own products?
Italo: I disagree with the statement that OOXML was approved “illegally”. On the other hand, it was
approved according to a “fast track” process which was totally inadequate for such a standard, and this
gave Microso the opportunity of using “politics” instead of the usual process (which could point out
that two document standards are a nonsense).

Actually, Microso is using OOXML specifications, but is not using them consistently between so ware
versions as the nature of the standard would request. So, we have OOXML 2007 Transitional, OOXML 2010
Transitional and OOXML 2013 Transitional, in addition to OOXML 2013 Strict (which is not the default
choice of Microso O ice 2013, and therefore non one is using it).

MS O ice users are not aware of this situation, and are producing a “rainbow” of document versions
which are a problem for interoperability.

Swapnil: Interoperability between OOXML files created with MS O ice and other o erings whether
it be LO, Google Docs or Calligra is a nightmare. Which is the reason of this non-interoperability?
Italo: LibreO ice is the free o ice suite which o ers the best level of interoperability with OOXML
documents, although it is not and will never be perfect. The issue is related to the non standard
management of the OOXML standard by MS O ice, and also to C-Fonts.

Of course, Microso has introduced C-Fonts when it had to replace the proprietary document formats
with a standard one (although mis-managed) in order to artificially extend the interoperability problems
to the visual appearance.

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Microso is extremely e icient when it comes to lock-in users, even
Gowith creative solutions. Of👤course,
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lock-in does not foresee interoperability, which is the opposite concept. Because of this, any kind of
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14 Jan 2017 - 1 Jun 2017 2016 2017 2018 ▾ About this capture
interoperability coming from Microso will include a degree of “creative” lock-in.

Swapnil: Is Microso doing something to make it harder for other vendors to work with OOXML?
Italo: Microso is apparently trying to make it easier to work with OOXML. Recently, the company has
released the OOXML SDK under the Apache License (no doubt that Microso will ever release something
with a true open source license such as GPL, LGPL or MPL).

The real actions against interoperability, though, will never be easy to spot. Microso is way too smart to
let the ecosystem suspect of a potential issue with document formats based on a specific obstacle built
into the standard. For instance, it took quite a long time to spot the C-Font trick built into the last
versions of MS O ice, and most users – including corporate IT managers – are still completely unaware of
it.

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Stefan Schwetschke
14 Jan 2017 - 1 Jun 2017 2016 2017 2018 ▾ About this capture

So if I get it correctly, the main problem with OOXML is that the fonts Calibri and Cambria are used as
defaults? So when I use a document template that has different default fonts, everything would be fine?

isacdaavid
It’s not just the proprietary fonts. If you read the article again you will see that Microsoft doesn’t even
comply with their own pseudo-standard that they rammed into the ISO committee. The plethora of office
suite providers and stand-alone office applications (openoffice, libreoffice, calligra, staroffice, abiword,
gnumeric) had been happily interoperating for years thanks to the ODF formats. Microsoft OOXML should
have never become a recognised standard.

Fortunately, increasingly more public offices are adopting ODF. The UK government last year, the French
government now.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs
https://www.april.org/en/french-government-it-directorate-stands-its-ground-odf-supported-ooxml-
rejected

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Corvus2
I’ve been telling people this for years, they say “Office for Mac is not as good, what is wrong with Apple?”
To which I respond, because that is the way MS wants it, Office was originally a Mac only product before
MS released Windows. Do you really think that if they wanted it to be 100% compatible they couldn’t do
it? Of course they could! They want you to stick with Windows and hesitate to switch. The C-font swap is
definitely the most annoying thing of all, it totally destroys the formatting.

Ninja Glace
A minor note: Vignoli does not consider the Apache License to be truly open-source, as opposed to GPL,
LGPL, and MPL. The Apache License really is open source, because open source is a development
methodology and not a software category; the other three licenses are for free software, which is a
political movement in addition to a software category.

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