MS Office 2007 SP2

[RoyGBiv]

Well now, what's all this, then?

Today the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system was announced. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. One big benefit is SP2’s boost to interoperability — with this release, Office supports additional built-in file formats such as PDF and ODF.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-28Office2007SP2QA.mspx

I'm not quite sure what to say.

If it's not immediately apparent, what I'm pointing out is that with MS Office SP2, you can now open and save ODF and PDF documents without all the hassle of installing 3rd-party plugins.

There was a thread not long ago that talking about this as being a problem with using OpenOffice. If you save the files in ODF and send them to an Office 2007 user, they probably won't be able to open them. I had that issue myself the last time I was floating my resume.

[charlie]

1. Probably the sound of the European Commission

kicking the shit out of Microsoft. Benevolent noises about "ease of use" and "collaboration" sound a lot better than Ballmer screeching, "Shit, piss, Godzilla muthafuckas! My sole legacy WILL NOT be the goddamned XBox, you bleeding morons!"

[hobbit709]

2. One of many reasons I use WordPerfect

WordPerfect does a better job of converting to Word than the other way around. The one page forms that I generated for my wife were 14K ibn size in .wpd, as a .doc they were 34K. If I used Word to convert from .wpd, the one page form became one page plus about an inch and half on a second page. If I saved as .doc in WordPerfect, it stayed a one page form. WordPerfect has long been able to export as PDF and the newest version will also open PDF. Much less the fact that WP will open and save a much wider range of document formats.
Hell, WP would open Excel spreadsheets, let me edit them, save the changes and not screw up-something that Excel won't even do half the time.

[charlie]

3. So...

Here are some field tests. The top two links are from IBM's Chief ODF Architect:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090503215045379

SP2 has managed to achieve a good degree of conformance to the specs, but seems to have thrown interoperability out the window. Quelle surprise!

I won't be cynical and mention Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish just yet, since it's too early to tell if Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish is their intent, and there's certainly no damning evidence of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish going on. So, I won't say it.

Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, that is.

[RoyGBiv]

4. How do you fuck that up?

Really. How?

It's an OPEN format. You don't have to guess. You don't have to piddle around and hope. It's just RIGHT THERE.

Oh, wait, yes, sorry ... I know. You fuck it up on purpose.

Of course they'll say it's just because some of Microsoft's features are so wowohmygodwecandotextinsixbillionshadesofthesamecolor advanced that ODF has no equivalent tags.

Did you know ... in Excel 2007, if you have an expression with a certain level of nesting and try to save it in another format, it deletes the expression and replaces it with a #VALUE error? This is supposedly because the older format doesn't support that level of nesting. However, this is utter crap. I wrote the damn expression in OpenOffice Calc, exported the spreadsheet into the older XP format for use by others, used it on the older Excel for about 6 months with NO PROBLEMS, and then someone who was using the spreadsheet opened it in 2007, and suddenly it was no longer compatible with that older format.

I had never run across this before, and now I'm wondering how many other things MS products "disable upon saving" in yet another of their dumbass attempts to force people to their Latest and Crappiest products ...

(ahem) 'Scuse me. Had a rather irritating day today with things like this. I was fighting MS Access all damn day trying to figure out how the hell they'd managed to make an already frustrating report generator even harder to use in the most recent version. Damn I hate Access with a burning white hot fired passion. Why people can't use a real database I have no idea. It makes me long for the days of dBase IV, which is terrifying.

[charlie]

5. Ever see the old comedy Bedazzled?

Satan gives a lovelorn schlub 7 wishes and grants them as asked, to the letter... then thwarts each one with a twist that falls outside the specs (One wish was that he and his love be united forever in a quiet setting away from the city. And so they are. But Satan makes him a nun). Somewhere in Redmond a working group regards that movie as a manifesto.

It's funny, MS used to be notorious for bloated whackadoodle code because they were so anal about not breaking legacy apps. If you look at the second table at the first link, SP2 currently fails at rendering spreadsheets created by Office's own compatibility plugin, the one they're still preening about on their "interoperability" site. If that doesn't get fixed before SP2 goes to Update, anyone who followed MS's recommendation will get burned.

I had never run across this before, and now I'm wondering how many other things MS products "disable upon saving" in yet another of their dumbass attempts to force people to their Latest and Crappiest products ...

Well, right now the two largest science journals, Science and Nature, are refusing all submissions created in Word 2007 because it borks MathML. Surely Word can save in the older .doc format though, right? You bet! But, in the conversion it turns math expressions into images. Images. Break out the OCR and pray it doesn't confuse delta with A, every editor's dream assignment.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Holy crap ...

IIRC, it was people in the academic community (especially mathematics and physics) and those involved with medical imaging who were screaming the loudest in a non-shrill way about Vista before it came out because of some of the things its "security" would do to their basic operations. Not "could" do, but "would" do.

I don't know why, but I'm really taken aback by this discovery of breaking something by saving it in an older format when it was in fact first saved in that older format and worked just fine. MS has done some incredibly stupid things in its day, but that's right up there near the top.

In my case, that little bit of idiocy shut down the grade recording operations of an entire department for half a day during FINALS week until I was able to figure out what the hell happened. I mean, a spreadsheet function doesn't just stop working one day for no reason for two dozen people all at the same time. I did have better things to do.

I'd sent them the thing in the older Excel format in the first place because that department hadn't upgraded to 2007 yet. And, of course, when you ask people "What has changed on your computer recently?" they never give a straight answer, so it didn't occur to me at first to check that. I figured it out only because I opened the original I had on my machine and just saved it with some test data, and up popped the warning about what Excel was about to do, LYING to me that the nesting wasn't compatible with older versions. Of course this also points to the brilliance of MS's whole system of warning boxes and what-have-you. They're so annoying, and people are so accustomed to just clicking "OK" to get rid of the box, that a bunch of PhDs never even bothered to read what the box had said.

Grrrr ...

[charlie]

7. Zounds!

Whatta mess! Their forced upgrade shenanigans are getting a bit close to suicidal, aren't they? It was funny when the British Parliament got swamped with complaints because the docs on their site suddenly wouldn't render. It's a headache when your department is at a standstill for a day. But, it's freaking dangerous when a doctor can't trust the integrity of a kid's medical records.

FWIW, this guy:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=33154513&threadid=33154485

replicated what you did, with the same result. His take is that Excel's calculation engine can handle deeply nested functions (as you've seen), no problem. The trouble is with the parser, which will barf if formulas are nested more than 7 deep. The stupid thing probably just counts matching parentheses. The program has the muscle, but has an interface that won't let you get at it. Wild, huh?

[RoyGBiv]

8. Well, holy sheep dip ...

Thanks for that link. I somehow feel ... I dunno, something more positive ... understanding more about how that happened.

As a non-MS part of my rant, I will add that the whole thing could have been avoided if the person approving the spreadsheet would have listened to me about how they wanted a certain part of the grades calculated and used a simpler system. The formula didn't *need* to be nested that deeply, but professors are weird about the magic they use to calculate grades. Simple percentages are just too ... simple I guess. I even ran a set of numbers using both my suggested method and their desired method and showed a potential difference in calculation of less than 0.01 percent, but nooooooo. I'm the idiot.

Anyway, I re-did the whole mess using an array, which is still way too complex (and took too damn much time) and gopod help the next poor schlob who has to figure that out if it needs editing while I'm not around. But, I didn't want to run the risk of someone accidentally saving it in the older format and borking it 5 minutes before grades have to be posted.

[charlie]

9. Lol, sounds like some math macho going on

Fie on your puny calculations. Floating point precision can make the difference between summa cum laude and summa cum lousy. About once every 500 years, anyway.

That Excel explanation put me a little more at ease, too. I mean, that "too deeply nested" excuse was so obviously contrived ("Too many notes!"), they couldn't be that stupid... well, they are that stupid, but the reason is slightly better.