SoftMaker.com

From developers point of view, is it worth to set ODF as a default format? The world is moving to open standarts and if someone have plans to introduce company- or goverment- or national-wide format, they choose between OOXML and ODF. Personally I don't like proprietary formats too and prefer use an open one. If ODF is really open and mature enough, why SM doesn't use it as a main format? And if ODF at current version cannot handle all SM can do, maybe you should consider a compatibility option? I mean user can check it in options to guarantee that documents will be fully ODF-compatible, even with some reduced markup capabilities.

I can see setting your OWN normal default to that, but I almost never use OOo. I use TM now exclusively and the other people at both the school where I teach and the university where I take courses continue to use Microsoft... Further, I don't think it is a good marketing strategy for a company like SM, who produce their own product to suddenly make ODF the default. I assume their goal is to maintain their own niche and over time grow their market share.

Just my 2 cents.

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Cheers
Jim

You can already set ODF (and others) as your default file format (Tools/Options/Files), but we won't make ODF the replacement format for our own format because it doesn't offer all the options that we need.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Jim, in fact I don't like Microsoft Office nor Open Office, it's because i'm here and looking for alternative office suite. My concern is about file format. Since SM uses his own file format, conversion to other is always question of filter quality, which may be good or bad but almost never ideal. And ODF is not mean Open Office, this format supported by number of office application - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_office_suites

Martin, then my question is - if I save newly created document as odt, what information may be lost or broken? And I hope you have plans to implement 2-way odf support to PlanMaker and Presentation.

Quite a few things can break when saving to ODT. Every file format, even if it is supported by multiple vendors, is a mirror image of the application for which it was created. The problem is that there is more feature overlap (and how certain features are implemented) between SoftMaker Office and MS Office than between SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org.

This means that a file format that mirrors what MS Office can do is more suitable for SoftMaker Office than a format that mirrors what OpenOffice.org can do. The non-native formats that work best with SoftMaker Office are DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, and PPT (and PPTX, when the filters are ready).

Two biggies that won't survive well in ODT (because OpenOffice.org's implementation of the respective features is, umm, "sub-optimal") are comments and tracked changes.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH