10 th ODF Plugfest – London, UK December 2014

Openness is Cross-Company Value Open Source Technology Center Open Solutions Group

ODF Support in Microsoft Office 2013 Microsoft’s Interoperability Undertaking [0] document: Support new ISO ODF versions “within 9 months of final publication by ISO” ODF 1.2 nearing end of ISO process ODF 1.2 support added in Office 2013 (January 2013) [0]: msft/docs/microsoft_interoperability_undertaking.doc msft/docs/microsoft_interoperability_undertaking.doc

ODF Support in Microsoft Office 2013

Microsoft Office 2013 ODF 1.2 Support Extension of our ODF 1.1 implementation ODF documents round-trip with high fidelity in Microsoft Office, with some exceptions: Office extensions: ODF provides no extensibility mechanism and, as such, Microsoft Office cannot store features which do not exist in ODF 1.2 inside ODF files, i.e.: Sparklines and data bars in Excel Smart Art Macros attached to documents Change Tracking ODF 1.2 mandatory manifest:version attribute

Microsoft Office 2013 ODF 1.2 Support Change Tracking: Generally known interoperability issue in ODF, primarily concerning: Changes in tables What to do with deleted text An OASIS SC has been set up to address the issue [1]: Microsoft is actively contributing to that SC Submitted a proposed solution in early 2011 Iteration still proceeding on that and other proposed solutions Until interoperability issues are resolved by the SC and the necessary changes made in the standard, Microsoft cannot implement ODF change tracking in Office [1]:

The ODF 1.2 “manifest:version” attribute In ODF 1.2, a mandatory manifest:version=“1.2” attribute was added to elements to distinguish ODF 1.2 files from ODF 1.1 files In ODF 1.1, unknown elements in known namespaces are not permitted (section 1.5) and so files which contain this attribute should be rejected by an ODF 1.1 parser Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 are ODF 1.1 implementations and, as such, declare these files corrupt, and offer to repair them (the repair will remove the attribute and open the file) Much discussion of the issue in the ODF TC [2] and the OIC TC [3] - situation remains that ODF 1.2 files are not valid to a correct ODF 1.1 consumer We initially saved out the attribute, but during early testing of Office 2013 we discovered that it created files which were regarded as invalid by Office 2010 and 2007 ODF 1.2 files are semantically compatible with ODF 1.1 in almost every way We made the call to not write this mandatory attribute into ODF 1.2 files in order to maximize interoperability with our ODF 1.1 implementation [2]: [3]: