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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do need for-profit alternatives to Word, and I’m working on one in legal. Wow, big undertaking! What we really need, though, is a for-profit alternative to Excel, that's not Google. I think Excel is more of the Killer App than Word has ever been.
That's Apple Numbers.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147639
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.
What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?
So the question is whether it was actually a loss.
> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…
Specifically what I heard on the grapevine was that Microsoft sponsored a collection of small island nations into the ISO process, in exchange for their vote on OOXML.
I think the last part is probably the biggest thing holding them back IMO... I tend not to install MS Office products on my personal devices, I haven't run Windows on a personal device in a few years. I've mostly maintained just my resume in word or libre-office format for well over a decade. I can't tell you how many times the LO format lost formatting, or just messed up between version upgrades. Same goes for openi…
Have you tried setting MSWord's default save format to Strict OOXML for inter-operation with LibreOffice?
But I have used Word for work.
> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…
If you can then confirm that I have no intention to stop (even though I know I'm hurting you) and all I have to say in my defense is, "Actually I do exactly whatever I want and just don't care about you at all," what is the difference to me at that point?
In practice total indifference is even more toxic than hate, because it denies engagement. I owe no extra charitability for callous indifference being the root cause of the actions taken. Company or person, society reserves the right to judge you on the effects your force of will brings forth on others. They used theirs to kill their competitors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?
Standards committees being completely divorced from reality of software engineering is why most of the standards are useless. So the question is whether it was actually a loss.
However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint, so why not code up a simple little reusable bit of code where you can write any simple tabular data (string, numbers, and dates, in one or more sheets of data made up of rows and columns) that lets you choose the output format? A zip-archive of CSV-files (one per sheet), JSON, ODS, or XLSX; pick your poison.
I did just that, and while it is perfectly doable, any low-level, low-resources, low-dependency approach will mean actually touching the XML in LibreOffice's ODS (fine), and Microsoft's OOXML (…).
This is how you write a date in a cell in both.
ODS:
10/4/2021, 12:34
XLSX (OOXML):
39448.5
And of course it makes perfect sense to hardcode the cell coordinate there. It's not like you would dynamically generate a bunch of cells (…).
If you ever write some HTTP endpoint where tabulated data is returned, you could quite reasonably return RFC 4180 style CSV. However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint, so why not code up a simple little reusable bit of code where you can write any simple tabular data (s…
Excel can directly ingest a CSV file served over an URL as data source, with the Accept header manually set to text/csv.
I wrote a backend once that supported this feature so that management could pull whatever data they wanted off an internal application without pestering me. They could literally take the URL of a page and pull it as a CSV file as-is.
Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.