Martin Bekkelund

Up here in Norway, representatives from Microsoft keeps running around spreading the word that OOXML is implemented in several applications, among them several Apple products — or products for the Mac OS X platform — such as iWork ‘08, iPhone and NeoOffice. As an Apple user, I have an iWork ‘08 license, I have an iPhone and I use NeoOffice as my primary office suite. Therefore, I would like to test the allegations.

First of all, I will like to point out that the format of documents produced by Microsoft Office 2007 is not OOXML (Ecma 376). Microsoft Office 2007 documents contains, according to my sources, many elements not specified in Ecma 376, such as binary code, macros, OLE objects, ActiveX, DRM and SharePoint metadata. Even the paper handling does not conform with Ecma 376. The documents produced by Microsoft Office 2007 goes by the name of MSOOXML, but in this article I will call it OOXML. However, this is not the point of this article. My point is to see if the document implementation in either iWork ‘08, iPhone or NeoOffice is usable in other applications.

Who can produce an OOXML document?

If we turn to the Apple website, Apple says the following on Pages ‘08 and compatibility:

Import your Microsoft Word documents into Pages ’08 with ease. Whether they’re Microsoft Office 2007 (Office Open XML) or earlier Word files, Pages will open them.

Great, I can open OOXML documents. But what if I have to make changes in the document, and return it to the sender? Saving documents as OOXML is not supported in any of the iWork ‘08 products. This is the list of supported document types:

Pages

• Apple’s own format (.pages)
• Older iWork versions
• PDF
• DOC (the old binary format)
• RTF
• Plain text

Numbers

• Apple’s own format (.numbers)
• PDF
• XLS (the old binary format)
• CSV

Keynote

• Apple’s own format (.key)
• Older iWork versions
• QuickTime
• PPT (the old binary format)
• PDF
• Pictures
• Flash
• HTML
• iPod

Based on this list, I’m stuck for now. It’s not possible to create OOXML documents with iWork ‘08. What about NeoOffice? Will NeoOffice be able to create OOXML compatible documents?

A simple test document

First, I need to create an OOXML document, with the file extension .docx. With NeoOffice, I’ve produced a very simple document, containing some text and a picture.

I save the document as «Microsoft Word 2007 Document (.docx)». Just to make sure, I save the document as ODF and OOXML.

In Mac OS X

As soon as the document is saved, I find it in Finder, the Mac OS X equivalent to Windows Explorer. I find both the ODF and the OOXML version:

As you can see, OOXML is apparently not fully implemented in Mac OS X. Finder has a preview of the content of known file types, but it does not show the content of the OOXML file, like it does with ODF. The ODF document has the file extension .odt. Mac OS X also has functionality called Quick Look to preview the whole file without opening it. However, that does not work either:

To compare it, the ODF file looks like this:

In Mac OS X applications

OK, we’ve sorted out that OOXML documents is not implemented in Mac OS X, apparently. What about other applications? By double clicking the OOXML document, Mac OS X will open the file in TextEdit, an advanced equivalent of Windows’ Notepad. This is what the document will look like in TextEdit:

I would like to claim that the implementation of OOXML in TextEdit is so defective that it is useless. Furthermore, I do not know anyone that uses TextEdit for word processing.

In iWork ‘08

What happens if I open the document with my iWork ‘08 application, Pages? Here’s the answer:

On the iPhone

What about the iPhone? Will it open my OOXML document? I send it by e-mail, where it appears in the inbox:

I open the e-mail and find the document attached:

Finally, I try to open the document. This is what happens:

Clearly, iPhone is not able to open the OOXML document. I’d like to point out that the document is not password protected.

Conclusion

I do not own a license for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and I will not buy one either. It might be possible to open documents produced by Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac with iWork ‘08, iPhone or NeoOffice, but that is irrelevant. One of the major points with interoperability, is vendor independence. If I have to buy a license for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a standard so difficult — not to say impossible — to implement, that users will have to buy Microsoft’s software.

As a final statement, I would like to point out that the allegations on OOXML beeing implemented in iWork ‘08, iPhone and NeoOffice are wrong.