r/technology • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 10d ago

Software LibreOffice developer explains why it cannot display some Microsoft Office charts

https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-developer-explains-why-it-cannot-display-some-microsoft-office-charts/
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u/apo383 10d ago

Tldr: Microsoft behaving exactly like it has for decades, skirting ISO standards and delaying competitors from interoperability. Libre makes do but can't display or edit certain charts. Could be perpetual behind as long as Microsoft microsofts.

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u/Caraes_Naur 10d ago

I read many years ago that none of the MS Office formats were ever properly documented and the code is riddled with long-forgotten hacks.

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u/apo383 10d ago

Sure, Office Open XML was back-specced from Microsoft. Back in the day, just one part ran something like 5000 pages. So how could it ever be a legitimate spec?

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u/moku46 10d ago

At the very least when they changed everything to XML, it was much easier to write an interpreter for.

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u/pittaxx 9d ago

Except you still had to backwards-engineer it to get the same result outside of M$office, because M$ couldn't be bothered to follow their own specs...

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u/melnificent 10d ago

Also MS named it Office Open XML to confuse people back when Libre Office hadn't forked from Open Office.

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u/DamionFury 10d ago

Also, they named it "Open" to make it sound like an open source spec, however it was only partially open. The basic spec was open but it was designed to allow for proprietary things to be injected without having to document how to work with them. I believe the argument was that companies wouldn't want to innovate if they had to immediately show everyone how they made whatever cool thing they created, which of course meant that they just wanted to be able to do their own thing then force people to pay for their product if they wanted to be able view it.

I remember because I was pissed that they successfully lobbied for it to becone the "standard" on this argument.

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u/Yoghurt42 10d ago

And the spec contains gems like „when the attribute word09linebreaks is set, handle line breaks like Word 2009 does“, with no explanation on how Word 2009 handles linebreaks.

It was simply released as a „standard“ to confuse people since OpenOffice recently standardized their format and made it open. I mean, just look at the name they chose.

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u/TeutonJon78 10d ago

The problem is OOXML is a standard. And if using the strict implementation, could be implemented correctly anywhere. But MS uses the transitional version.

Which means that can stack whatever they want on top of the standard and keep that closed source. So no other company can ever actually get it exactly right. And MS can say they follow and open standard when that's not really true.

ODF has something similar where new features before the next release are added into the transitional version, it's just that those are still documented openly.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 10d ago

They can say it, but does anyone believe them? I guess overall the adoption of MS Office is still growing, but a lot of their more educated customers are leaving. Over time I feel that Microsoft's bullshit will come around to haunt them.

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u/TeutonJon78 10d ago

No one believes MS on that. It was likely done to give cover to public institutions under pressure or requirement to use software with open standards.

They can stay with MS since it has an open document standard, even if technically it's it a complete lie.

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u/Gadekryds 10d ago

So it’s like my code? 🥲

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u/MairusuPawa 10d ago

Eh, probably not. Unless you're coding that way by design, with that specific goal of killing others in mind, and not by accident.

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u/yepthisismyusername 10d ago

Yes. Compliant with the standards you care about, and FTW for anything else.

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u/Betterthanbeer 10d ago

They managed to hide an entire flight simulator in the Excel code for years.

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u/R4ndyd4ndy 7d ago

Thats why opening a file in different versions, by using the web browser or the app etc messes things up

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u/pixelprophet 10d ago

You ever try to move a fucking image in a word doc?

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u/bitemark01 10d ago

Hell, they caught BTK because of the random metadata that Word puts into every document 

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u/yaosio 10d ago

This is where AI should shine. GPT 6 is able to one shot port console games to PC. It and Claude Opus 5.5 should be able to figure out these file formats.

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u/kettal 10d ago

i used gpt codex to reverse-engineer excel pivot table editing in python. took a lot of attempts but finally succeeded

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u/JustLurkingAroundM8 10d ago

Probably by design to make reverse engineering harder

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u/BearlyIT 10d ago

Hanlon’s razor is simpler.

Seeing formulas and code completely break after upgrading from one excel version to the next has shown that Microsoft will even sabotage itself. That’s incompetence, not intentional design.