Malte Timmermann's Blog

Q: What's the difference between this release and the "Technology Preview" version of the Plugin?

A: Well, basically, it does, but there is an issue in Word's 2007 Filter API handling. You can save to ODF, but when you try to open ODF, Word ignores the installed filters and tries to open with it's own filters. Of course Word can't, so you get an error message "The Office Open XML file <name> cannot be opened because there are problems with the content". This even happens if you explicitly select the ODF filter! I hope Microsoft will fix this issue with the next service pack. If not, we will work around this bug by doing the same kind of integration like in PowerPoint and Excel.

A: Yes, it is! Of course, if you desire - Sun is also offering Support and Service contracts for this. It's a Sun product, and as such, we will actively support and maintain it for many years.

A: We are just working on a localized version. The plan is to have only one MUI (Multi User Interface) version, which will detect and use the language that you are using in MS Office.

Q: What's the difference between the Sun Plugin and the "OpenXML/ODF Translator" on SourceForge.net ?

Comments:

Thats cool. But will there be OpenXML imports/exports for OpenOffice in the near future?

Posted by Dennis on July 04, 2007 at 03:25 PM CEST #

Hi Malte, I have a questions. I'm using OOo 2.2.1 exclusively for private and work related purposes. During my work I intensively use Bibus for reference management (but this shouldn't matter) and working with references works like a charm within OOo (*.odt <-> *.odt). But exporting to MS Office (*.odt -> *.doc) leds into trouble, meaning that references are not working anylonger in MS Office (BTW, *basic* reference management in MS Office is a disaster in contrast to OOo). Would this plug-in offer a way to overcome this issue? (For any reason I doubt that).

Posted by oliver on July 04, 2007 at 06:13 PM CEST #

Dennis - if the problem lays in the conversion, we probably could fix that. Please write an issue on openoffice.org for the module "sw" and attach a demo document. If you like, let me know the issue id.

Posted by Malte on July 04, 2007 at 06:34 PM CEST #

Malte wrote: "Dennis - if the problem lays in the conversion, we probably could fix that. Please write an issue on openoffice.org for the module "sw" and attach a demo document. If you like, let me know the issue id." Do you mean me instead of Dennis?

Posted by oliver on July 04, 2007 at 08:31 PM CEST #

Hi Malte - Excellent work but i was surprised that this was released quietly. No need for a song and dance but still this merited better publicity and visibility.

Posted by Gopal on July 06, 2007 at 03:36 AM CEST #

Hey Malte- I'm looking into the issue you guys are seing with Office 2007. I think the problem is that when Word goes to open the odf file, we sniff it and mistakenly believe that it's a .docx. Usually we'll sniff a file and if we don't think it's something we can open we'll hand it off to the registered converters to see if they can deal with it. Since we initially think it's a .docx, it means that we try to open it natively and never hand it off to the converters. I'll look into it a bit more though and see what we can do about it. -Brian

Posted by Brian Jones on July 06, 2007 at 07:20 PM CEST #

Brian, that was exactly my assumption. Word detects that it's a zip container, and concludes it must be it's own new format ;) Thanks for looking into that!

Posted by 192.9.112.196 on July 06, 2007 at 07:32 PM CEST #

I just installed the plugin, but it does not work. I tested to open with Word an odt file which I had saved with OpenOffice 2.2. I have Office 2003 in Finnish language but the XP is English version. I receive an error in Finnish: "An error occurred in opening the file".

Posted by Erkki Ahola on July 08, 2007 at 03:47 PM CEST #

The plugin works smoothly. I have Off2003 with the Compatibility pack for Off2007 installed. When I open a ODF doc, a dialog box pops up stating - "The file needs to be opened by the ODF Text Document text converter, which may pose a security risk if the file you are opening is a malicious file. Choose Yes to open this file only if you are sure it is from a trusted source" Selecting Yes opens the file without any loss of formatting.

Posted by Gopal on July 09, 2007 at 05:24 PM CEST #

One grouse - We have to manually delete the installation files which are unpacked into a folder. Why can't the install routine remove the folder on completion of installation ?

Posted by Gopal on July 09, 2007 at 05:31 PM CEST #

Gopal, see the readme for solution to disable the security warning, if you like To your question reg. deleting installation files. This is because it's a 2 phases process. The EXE you download is just a container with all the installation files that normally come on CD. After extracting them, the setup is started automatically for convenience purpose. The extracted installation files can be used multiple times, anytime, so they are not removed.

Posted by Malte on July 09, 2007 at 06:06 PM CEST #

[Trackback] Sun releases plug-in for MS Office to work seamlessly with ODF (ISO 26300) documents. The free plug-in supports Office 2000, XP and 2003. ...

Posted by Plan-B for Software Documentation on July 11, 2007 at 03:33 PM CEST #

Hey Malte, I looked into this some more. It looks like it is a bug on our side similar to what I'd described. I think we'll be able to get a fix for that, but I'm not sure how long that will take to get out. Most likely though we'll be able to get it into the first service pack for Office 2007. I'll keep you posted. In looking into this though we found a few other bugs you guys might be interested in. A couple of them are places where we crash/hang, but there may be ways for you guys to do things a bit differently to avoid it (not sure). The bugs look like they appear in older versions of Word as well (not just limited to 2007): 1. The converter requires msvcr71.dll. While this module is a part of the download pack, it does not get installed to any directory in %PATH%. So, unless some other app happened to already place msvcr71.dll in some directory in %PATH%, the converter will not boot. 2. Word crashes when attempting to save a blank document via the converter. It looks like the save operation does succeed, as an ODF file ends up on disk. This crash is not 100%, but it is very consistent. 3. Word hangs when attempting to save a non-blank document via the converter. The hang is not 100%, but it is fairly consistent (more consistent in Word12 than in Word11). Those last two bugs occur in Word's code, but we don't see it with other converters so I'm wondering if it's something special you guys are doing. It appears that you make a number of call backs to our object model during the save, and that may be one of the causes. Is there some more information you're looking for that you don't get with the RTF? Is there something we could help out with so that you no longer need to make those OM calls? -Brian

Posted by Brian Jones on July 16, 2007 at 08:24 PM CEST #

Hey Malte, I looked into this some more.

It looks like it is a bug on our side similar to what I'd described. I think we'll be able to get a fix for that, but I'm not sure how long that will take to get out. Most likely though we'll be able to get it into the first service pack for Office 2007. I'll keep you posted.

In looking into this though we found a few other bugs you guys might be interested in. A couple of them are places where we crash/hang, but there may be ways for you guys to do things a bit differently to avoid it (not sure). The bugs look like they appear in older versions of Word as well (not just limited to 2007):

The converter requires msvcr71.dll. While this module is a part of the download pack, it does not get installed to any directory in %PATH%. So, unless some other app happened to already place msvcr71.dll in some directory in %PATH%, the converter will not boot.
Word crashes when attempting to save a blank document via the converter. It looks like the save operation does succeed, as an ODF file ends up on disk. This crash is not 100%, but it is very consistent.
Word hangs when attempting to save a non-blank document via the converter. The hang is not 100%, but it is fairly consistent (more consistent in Word12 than in Word11).

Those last two bugs occur in Word's code, but we don't see it with other converters so I'm wondering if it's something special you guys are doing. It appears that you make a number of call backs to our object model during the save, and that may be one of the causes. Is there some more information you're looking for that you don't get with the RTF? Is there something we could help out with so that you no longer need to make those OM calls?

-Brian

Posted by Brian Jones on July 16, 2007 at 08:26 PM CEST #

Brian,

thanks for looking into this more deeply! :)

It would be really great if you could fix that with SP1, because a work around solution wouldn't be very user friendly.
Not only because of the missing neat integration, but also because of something that's missing in Word's VBA: "SaveCopyAs". This is only available in Excel and PowerPoint, but strangely not in Word. For this reason, people would have to save their current document in DOC every time before saving as ODF. Nothing people would accept...

I already stumbled over the problem with the msvcr71.dll and just posted a work around.

To the other issues in Word: We are doing these call backs into Word for good reasons, but I think discussing the details in a blog entry is a little bit laboriously. I will use the email form in your blog to start a discussion via email...

Posted by Malte on July 17, 2007 at 04:56 PM CEST #

I came across this article by Gary Edwards & Marbux - see link - http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/072307-opendocuments-grounded.html?page=5 There are some pretty strong comments about Sun, OOo and ODF. Could someone clarify.

Posted by Gopal on July 27, 2007 at 07:23 AM CEST #

Is the ODF plugin better, than the import/export filter of OO for files in .doc format?

I think it is a great idea, that MS Office users will be able to save their files in ODF, I am just woundering whether it gives results superior or equal to the import/export filter for .doc files of OO.

regards

Uwe Brauer

Posted by Uwe Brauer on September 12, 2007 at 11:06 AM CEST #

Uwe,

the plugin uses StarOffice, so the results are quite the same like with OOo.

The Plugin reveals problems faster, because the import/export round trip is used more often now than when people use OOo and seldomly export to MS Office.

We try to fix these problems when people report them, so the improvements will benefit the Plugin as well as StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

Posted by Malte on October 01, 2007 at 05:44 PM CEST #

I read your blog and there isn't any doubt Sun ODF Plugin really supports to ms office and it is also free.

Thank you
Damon Thomas

Posted by PowerPoint Recovery on October 18, 2007 at 01:21 PM CEST #

Comparing the ODF plugin with the DOC filter:
Unfortunately as far as I tested, the ODF filter is a little worse than the (Staroffice) OO word (doc) filter. Here is my experience:

the original document was created by MS office 2007 Hebrew, I used
OO 2.1 linux (english) and 2.3 Windows XP (english) and MS Office 2003 for which I installed the ODF plugin.

#the original document was generated by MS Office 2007 (and yes the author used the new XML format which I could not read). He then used the old bin doc format. The document contain enumerated lists and colors first red, the latter caused the problems.
#I could open that document without problems in OO add some text and colors (yellow.)
#the other author modified and added more colors (green) and then the problems started.
#In OO (2.1 and 2.3) I could only see parts of the sentences colored in green, I checked with Word 2003 there the colors were fine.
#I installed the pdf plugin with some problems, that is XP crashed I had to reboot. Then I save the file in odf format and
#opened it with OO (2.1 and 2.3) then no green (the second change) could be seen.

I admit this is not a very deep test but I was surprised I thought the plugin would do at least as well as the doc import/export.

Uwe Brauer

Posted by Uwe Brrauer on January 14, 2008 at 05:42 PM CET #

Uwe, some weeks ago we figured out that Word does not give the same RTF (used internally) to the Plugin like when using Save-As.
We found some API to increase the RTF-Level, and that fix will be included in the next release.
I assume this should fix your problem.

Posted by Malte on January 15, 2008 at 10:11 AM CET #

Dear Sir

About digital certificates in OpenOffice for Mac.

I think this is a great feature for implementation in OpenOffice for Mac OS X.
See, digitally signing and digital certificates work very well in Neooffice.
This is it is each more important for the users of the most varied countries:
N National ID Cards

Finnish ID Card FINEID
Swedish Posten eID
Estonian ID Card EstEID
Italian Infocamere
Italian Postecert
Belgian eID
Spanish Ceres
German ID Cards, eHBA, eGK
Taiwan
Austrian Bürgerkarte, e-card
Australian national ID card
United States PIV card applet
Turkish EID Card
See:
http://eid.belgium.be/fr_BE/fed_ict/imported_content_eid/pdf/eID-FR-OpenOffice_Windows.pdf

The Mac user needs this for OpenOffice for Mac !!
If the team of OpenOffice implement this functionality are in advantage.

The Microsoft Office Mac 2008 not support.
The Iwork of Apple not support.

Best Regards

Manuel Silva
Portugal

Posted by manuel Silva on April 17, 2008 at 04:49 AM CEST #

Malte, you say there are things that can't be transformed with XSLT, because you need information about the computed layout. You can give me an example? I presume reverse engineering is often worse than XML to XML transformation.

Posted by Bruno on March 24, 2009 at 09:02 PM CET #

Hi Bruno,

this is mostly about things related to pages: If a text frame or an image is anchored to page <n>, then the filter needs to know where to find page <n>. This depends on the layout, information if not included in ODF.

(With ODF 1.1 we introduced the possibility to markup soft page breaks, so newer documents might work with XSLT, but only when written with newer versions of OOo, KOffice probably doesn't export this information)

Posted by Malte on March 25, 2009 at 10:01 AM CET #



Malte Timmermann's Blog Malte about some of his work at Sun Microsystems, Inc.