which complicates compatibility with open-source software such as LibreOffice.
Or any competitor. Which is why this "standard" should be declared anticompetitive.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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The actual article— Hacker News.
And also:
The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary.
I fully support this. This is a very easy to implement. 99% of the documents don't require specific msoffice undocumented features that odf format doesn't support
Yes, it would probably force microsoft to adhere to the specs if their files didn't work more users.
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"OOXML" is literally just an XML serialization of MS Office internal data structures that Microsoft bribed the standards body to push through.
"bribed" is a gross simplifiction of the almost hilariously evil plot they pulled to get OOXML certified. They actually bribed a couple of smaller nation states to become IETF members and vote for Microsoft's standard. It was a major scandal back in the day but formally legal.
I remember that plot also gumming up IETF business because the bribed nations just stopped participating after voting for Microsoft.
I remember, only trouble is a lot of people at the time didn't care or were paid loads of money to not care.
Also the name Office Open XML right at the time OpenOffice was the only one about before oracle came in and fucked it over
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FYI: it wasn't a bribe. It was a temporary takeover of the standards body. They paid for memberships of a bunch of new people on the board for the critical vote.
So, a bribe with the proper bureaucratic steps?
I think saying that they "bribed the standards body" suggests the body was in on it. The actual allegation (I don't know any facts, just these comments) seems to be that the body was subverted by other countries that were bribed by Microsoft. Being someone who doesn't know the details there's a worthwhile distinction there. Though that still opens questions about the board's reaction, and I might read up on it all later.
Let me assure you that the original board that was voting for Open Office's proposal was absolutely pissed off, short of dissolving but eventually unable to revert the decision because of it's formal correctness.
...and bribed the represenatives of the "new" IETF members as well as their governments to vote for Microsoft's standard. The latter was, of course, a matter strictly between "business partners" and probably barred behind NDAs, so "legal" as long as nobody would blow the wistle.
I kinda get it though. I think every single time in my life I’ve sent a document in the non-Microsoft format I’ve got a reply saying they couldn’t open it. That’s from LibreOffice and from Mac.
Trying to get tech illiterate people to use LibreOffice and to export their documents as PDF but they just keep sending the original files every single time... nightmare material
"Don't use that proprietary format ! Use PDF instead !"
PDF is also an issue.
There are often also accessibility issues with PDF files depending on how they were created.
For best results, print your word doc and scan it back in on a flatbet scanner. Fun fact you don't even need to keep the piece of paper square to the scanner.
Or just take a picture of your monitor and text it.
Hire a barbershop quartet to sing it to them.
Unrelated anecdote, my brother's then wife post a picture of them on Facebook. Our aunt saw it, took a picture of her monitor with her phone, went to the store to have them print the photo out on photo paper, and then mailed it to my brother.
So he got his original photo back, but at a greatly reduced quality and with monitor glare added!
PDF can be opened anywhere, that's my point.
* Only if you dont use the many still proprietary extensions of PDF I suppose.
Anyway I'm not sure following the Adobe standard in our institutions is the smartest move.
Not solely, but since sooooo many documents are already only available in PDF, you need to support it for backwards compat alone, plus all the people who just wouldn't migrate their data to a new format because the old one still works for them.
I'd love if there were a true open standard with the same capabilities and support, but you're not gonna get companies to adopt that out of the kindness of their hearts.
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In college my professor wouldn't accept pdfs for assignments because I guess he couldn't check the metadata or make comments or something.
So I literally had to download MS office just to submit assignments in their format...
There are some people who míght learn from a ransomware attack. Only if it personally hits them, of course.
I don't know enough to understand the connection. Can you please explain?
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Damn, I was gonna say just use web version, but they do often have missing features compared to app, so I understand why you had to download it...
The web version is even worse! It's all cloud-based, and you need a subscription unless your University pays for a license.
The only reason to use it would be to write things in Libre and then copy/paste them into MS and manually fix all the formatting.
I hated it, because all the professors could just smugly say "You know you have free access to Office 365 with your student email, right?"
That's not the fucking point! I don't give a shit if it's free, I don't want to use a fucking microsoft product, especially one that's cloud-based, when there's a perfectly good open-source alternative that I can run locally on my own hardware.
Just one of the many problems with the corporatization, commodification, and enshittification of education. If the focus was on learning and academic freedom, FOSS solutions would be encouraged. But no, you're forced to use proprietary software, because "~~reasons~~" capitalism...
The web version is even worse! It's all cloud-based, and you need a subscription unless your University pays for a license.
You don't actually need a subscription for the cloud web version actually. It's ass though.
And everytime I get a document in a Microsoft format I send a reply asking if this or that is supposed to look that way or be that value. Yet it's the open format and tools that's an issue somehow.
One thing I do like from LibreOffice is the ability to save to PDF but also embed the original document inside it.
That way almost anyone can see it as intended, and the original is still there for editing.
Whoa I didn’t know that was an option, is it part of the export menu? That would make some of my - we needed to change something after all - situations much easier at work.
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Either the person is lying, because MS Office claims compatibility with OpenDocument files, or it isn't actually compatible and Microsoft itself is lying.
Give me CSV or give me death
i will also accept LibreOffice's format for formula purposes
CSV does not allow storing formulas, just results. It is a good format to share data, but it is not a good format to store spreadsheets which very often contain such formulas.
Formulas are just strings, no reason you couldn't store over in a CSV.
Maybe your software doesn't want you to do that, but that's a problem with that specific software.
Do you know of any software which stores formulas in CSV?
It's an option when saving in LibreOffice Calc.
Would be a pretty straightforward macro to (un)quote the formulas in Excel or Google Sheets etc.
I didn't know calc could do that, cool!
you can store anything in CSV, it's just not always very practical ;)
Just like opening a .doc file in notepad, technically all the information is there
I don't think you can have spreadsheets with multiple "sub sheets" (can't think of an unambiguous name for them - basically the equivalent of browser tabs)
Pretty sure there's no way to have graphical charts either.
The technical term is sheet. The many sheets form a workbook (your file).
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csv is a pretty good data sharing format, but not very well suited for spreadsheets. Just because you can shove anything you want in there doesn't mean you should.
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Death it is, CSV is horrible effectively unstandardized trash that has led to uncountable hours of efforts wasted due to subtly corrupted data through incompatible serialization settings.
It actively makes the world a worse place by existing.
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