iWork Not ODF-Capable Yet
Tuesday, 2008-February-05
In January of 2007, I mentioned some speculation that Apple was going to add ODF capability to their iWork suite. Mac users know that this did not turn out to be true. In fact, iWork ships with rudimentary import-only support for OOXML.
I said:
There is also some expectation that it will support the use of ODF file formats, but not as default.
I mention this because it has been mentioned that iWork definitely does do ODF, with me as the reference. Like the author over there, I would encourage Apple to add ODF capability to iWork. Even if I had a Mac, I would have no use for iWork until it could exchange files with NeoOffice and other ODF-using applications.
As an aside to NeoOffice, please move the bright yellow highlighted patch notices to a separate page linked from your home page. You are chasing away potential users, who think that NeoOffice does not work with Leopard or that they have to install patch files before they can use the software.
3 Comments Add your own
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1.
Jonny Chaos | Thursday, 2008-February-14 at 1:06
I should have mentioned in my blog post that apple is rumoured to be supporting ODF. It would give an edge to IWork, particularly if adoption of ODF widens.
2.
flyingpenguin | Wednesday, 2008-February-20 at 7:06
yes, absolutely. and it would push the creation of a TRULY vendor-independent format even further.
it would be SO nice to know that no matter what OS I am on, no matter what tool I use, my data is always almost fully readable with any app I can buy / download.
3.
Ken | Friday, 2008-April-18 at 8:45
I’d love to see Apple support, if not ODF by default, then some sort of mechanism to choose what format you want to use: ODF, iWork, or (much as it pains me to write it) OOXML. That seems like the best way to foster open standards.
But, would it even be possible to express Numbers documents in ODF format? I don’t know anything about the XML-based formats, but ODF seems to be dependent on having a single-table-per-sheet model. Could a multiple-table-per-sheet model even work?
If so, there would be no going back from iWork for me. But as it is, I’m not willing to sacrifice data portability by not using ODF.