Office Software and Freedom of Choice

This post is not just another attempt to slam companies such as Microsoft for abusing their monopoly or close-to-monopoly market positions. What I want to talk about here is the issue of real freedom of choice for computer users in how they are able to use the data that they create in the course of going about their daily lives. This data could well include word processing documents and spreadsheets.

There is a growing split in the computer software world between organisations that make the format of data stored by their products conform to open standards and those that insist on using proprietary data formats.

Why should this concern the average computer user?

The reason this issue is important is that when proprietary data formats are preferred, the user is locked into having to continue using a given organisation's software. This can lead to complications on a number of fronts:

• The software producer goes out of business - then there is no way to ensure that the data can be used anymore if the software becomes unusable for other reasons. For example, if software was written for Windows 3.1 or 95 it may not run correctly, if at all, under later versions of Windows. On the other hand, if you are lucky then the software will continue to run without problems.
• The software producer changes the data format when a new version of their product is released. This is most often a reasonable state of affairs, but it can mean that older data needs to be reformatted for it to be used by the new version of the software. The software producer would normally include a method of data conversation in their upgraded software. You could upgrade if the newer version gives you additional benefits. This might be an expensive choice if continued software usage requires further payment.
• In the above two cases, your needs may change and the software you have no longer meets your real requirements. What then?
• What do you do if someone sends you a spreadsheet? If the data format is proprietary, such as with Excel xls files, then if you don't have a copy of Excel you have a major problem. Even if the sender had put the data in a text format like CSV there would be difficulties. Any embedded formulas would have been lost.

The answer to all the above problems is for software producers to use open standard data formats. This would mean, for example, that the received spreadsheet could be correctly viewed using an entirely different program from that which was used to create it. This other program would understand any embedded spreadsheet formulas and the opened spreadsheet would behave as its creator(s) intended.

Until fairly recently there have been few choices, particularly in the area of office software, which did not lock the user into the trap of proprietary data formats. The emphasis in this post is on office software because that where the locking-in of users to specific software publishers seems to be the most prevalent. By comparison, in the area of graphics software, most programs seem to be able read and write the data in many different open formats.

Now programs like OpenOffice and AbiWord are able to read and write various Microsoft office document formats, among other formats. Unfortunately neither product can use Microsoft VBA macros, but OpenOffice can preserve them in non-running format. On the positive side, the OpenOffice spreadsheet product, Calc, can use embedded formulas in Excel spreadsheets. At present the conversion procedures for the common Microsoft data formats are generally very good, but not perfect. This means, for example, that a Word document created or amended using OpenOffice may not look exactly the same when opened in Word itself. From what I have read, this sort of problem is far more likely to occur if the documents concerned are more complex. My office type documents tend to be relatively basic in format although I do use formulas in my spreadsheets and have written some VBA macros.

The move towards the goal of data being independent from the program which created it has now taken a major step forward with the creation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) specification. This OASIS format is expected to become an industry standard for sharing documents. It has currently been adopted by the OpenOffice/StarOffice software suite and the AbiWord and KOffice developers are, as I understand it, in the process of adding OpenDocument support to their products. I suspect that as time goes on the OpenDocument standard formats will be generally accepted as the standard office document formats and more software developers will incorporate them in their products. Currently many government organisations around the world have adopted or are examining the adoption of these open standards.

If you don't have a need to exchange office documents with others in Microsoft data formats, I would urge you to seriously consider those products which store their data in non-proprietary formats. OpenOffice is as feature rich as any Microsoft Office product and not that different in day-to-day usage. AbiWord is significantly simpler than current versions of Word, but it has many if not all of the features that the average office software user requires. In addition, some of these alternate office programs are free to use and can be freely downloaded from the Internet.