Brian Jones: Office Solutions

Ecma TC45 and the project editor are making great progress in the resolution of comments we received from the national bodies a few months ago. The result will be an even better spec than we had last year, and this really helps highlight the benefits...

Jan van den Beld, a long time member of the standards community and former Secretary General of Ecma international is now blogging: http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2007/11/starting-my-blog.html I had the privilege of working with Jan last year when...

For those of you planning on being in the Boston area next week, you should plan on checking out the XML 2007 conference . There will be a full day Interoperability track that should have a great set of discussions. I'm going to be in Kyoto next week...

I wanted to provide a bit of an update on how things are going in TC45 as we look through the various National Body comments that came in with the Open XML ballot. The ballot resolution meeting (BRM) is going to be the last week of February, and on January...

Well, I've come back up for air briefly and wanted to quickly point out to folks a really important announcement we made yesterday . We're teaming up with the DAISY consortium to build translation tools that will convert OpenXML documents into the DAISY...

I'm pretty knee deep in work for the next version of Office, as well as the ISO comments on OpenXML, so my blogging over the next few weeks will be pretty limited. I did want to point out a couple links I came across recently though: Mac OS X Leopard...

Corel just announced the availability of a new beta version of WordPerfect that provides support for both Open XML as well as ODF. They provide for a number of choices in document formats, with Open XML and ODF being the two latest supported formats....

Well I thought I would have time to work more on the FAQ the past couple weeks, but that was naive of me. I've had zero free time, and had to struggle just to get a few free minutes to pull this post together. Hopefully things will slow down soon. (hAl...

OK, I'll admit its pretty lame that it's been almost two weeks since my last post. I've been pretty busy with non-OpenXML stuff at work as we just finished wrapping up the annual performance reviews so I had to focus on writing those up. We're also getting...

It looks like AbiWord, which is an open source word processing application is now working on Open XML support. http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/OpenXMLImport They finished up inline formatting about a month ago, and I'm not sure what...

Well, we're almost done with the latest stage in the ISO standardization of Open XML. On Monday, all the national bodies voting on Open XML (I think there are a bit over 100 total!) will submit their current opinion on the Open XML standard. I think that...

Well we're in the middle of our last face to face meeting for Ecma TC45 before the ISO vote on September 2. Novell is hosting it up in Toronto, and it's actually given us a chance to meet some of the developers who are integrating Open XML into Open Office...

Similar to what we just saw from Germany earlier this week, the US has voted to approve Open XML as an ISO standard. The result of the vote for "yes with comments" is posted here: http://ballot.itic.org/itic/tallyvote.taf?function=vote&committee=INCITS&ballot_id...

I was out for the past week at a family event in Winnipeg. I didn't have any access to e-mail or internet and was pretty surprised to see the number of comments from my post last week . I have to admit I don't think I'll be able to read through and reply...

Here are a couple cool screenshots from Stephen McGibbon where he shows an OpenXML spreadsheet file created with Gnumeric (runs on Linux & Windows), and the file is then opened up in Numbers (Apple's new spreadsheet app for the Mac). Gnumeric ...

Sorry for just posting links the past week or so. I haven't had much time to pull anything new together. Hopefully I'll have some more free time when I get back into the office next week. Can anyone be objective about Open XML? Great blog entry from...

I talked the other week about how the iPhone supports the Open XML formats . It's pretty incredible to see such a huge uptake in applications that support the format, given that the standard was finalized less than 9 months ago. The traditional applications...

Well, I just got back from vacation this afternoon, and it looks like there were some great developments at the end of the month. I just saw up on Doug's blog that Massachusetts now supports Open XML: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/08/01/massachusetts...

I'll be offline for the next week or so. Sorry if I don't answer your e-mails or comments during that time. I'll try to get caught up early August. In the mean time though, check out this article up on eweek: Setting a New Standard As a user of OpenOffice...

Doug Mahugh has another update on what's going on with the US review of the Open XML standard. They've finalized the ballot, and are will have a couple weeks to vote on whether or not to approve the ballot: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/07...

Jason is on the standards team in Microsoft, and he has a blog post discussing some of the moves to block Open XML at ISO coming from the anti-OpenXML movement (they even set up a 2,500 euro bounty on it): http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive...

This is pretty cool. I already talked about how there is support for the open xml formats on the palmOS . I was looking into the iPhone today and it looks like it has support not just for .doc, .xls, .pdf, and .html; but also has for .docx and .xlsx...

Here are a few interesting links related to the Open XML formats US technical committee reaches deadlock – Doug talks about how the discussions went in the US technical committee tasked with reviewing the Open XML formats. It sounds like they were just...

I'm going to try to get back on top of all the e-mails folks have been sending me. If you've e-mailed me over the past 6 months the odds are that I didn't reply yet, and I'm sorry about that. I'll start reading through the e-mails again and rather than...

I saw this blog post from Rob Wier the other day, and I thought it would be worth drilling into a bit more. While Rob tends to have a flare for the dramatics he does point out a couple of good bugs in the formulas piece of the Open XML spec. Rob's actually...