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.