Conformance problems: ODF and OOXML
Apparently, the wikipedia page I linked to in my previous post about ODF supporting software is overly optimistic according to Peter Sefton’s blog. He demonstrates that only OpenOffice.org and StarOffice works properly with ODF while others have serious problems even with very basic formating. There is also a very useful converter table posted by Peter.
OK, so that brings the ODF conformance count down to 2, however, this is still 2 more than the number of applications that conform to the OOXML standard, which is exactly zero at this moment according to these tests. So, the race is on, the result is 2:0 so far with ODF in the lead 
ZZ. — A proud member of the ODF “cheer squad”
May 13th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
ZZ, this is good to know. I’m curious - why are XML office document formats of such interest to you/SimBioSys?
May 17th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Rich, the interest is strictly personal, nothing to do with SimBioSys business. I am an exclusive Linux user, i.e. I never really “worked” on Windows platform or MS software in general. I “grew up” on DOS: IBM-DOS or DR-DOS, I hated MS-DOS and avoided it
, then in 1993 when I started my PhD in Leeds, it was all on Unix (Sun Solaris and SGI Irix). After that I did not want to leave the unix world, so I installed my first Linux system in 1996. I keep using Linux ever since, tried many distro, my favorite is Mandriva. In the SimBioSys office we have about 8 different linux versions on various machines, still have a couple of Irix boxes, two Suns and one windows box in the far corner of another room - nobody works on it and I do not ever touch it 
Bottomline is, the binary doc/ppt formats were always causing lots of incompatibility headache for me (when people send me such or I have to send a document to someone). So I was very happy when ODF got accepted as an ISO standard, finally I had a hope that in a few years the world will switch to that format and my document exchange problems disappear. Unfortunately, the monopoly marketing machine went into overload mode to shove OOXML down people’s throat as a counter move - to prevent interoperability forever. OK, end of rant…
ZZ.