LibreOffice Microsoft puts its commercial interests above all else

There is logic in the title of the article, what company wouldn't do that? But this behavior by Microsoft is highly anti-competitive.

Despite the fact that LibreOffice is free, one of the main issues that prevents users from making the switch from Microsoft Office is compatibility. While Microsoft's suite is generally compatible with the company's file formats, at times, users encounter strange quirks with formatting and layout.

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In fact, The Document Foundation (TDF), the people behind LibreOffice, has criticized Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior. It has long been argued that Microsoft's file formats are intentionally complex to keep users locked into its ecosystem.

Now, the TDF is stepping up its efforts, accusing Microsoft of ignoring everything “for its own commercial interests.” In a post by Italo Vignoli, a founding member of the TDF , he called the idea that “OOXML is a standard format and we should accept it,” to put it mildly, “ outrageous .”

Vignoli says that OOXML “could never be a standard file format” unless Microsoft was willing to completely redesign its Office applications, and he cited Excel’s long-standing failure to properly handle gene names as an example, which destroyed scientific data and had implications for genetic disease research.

Excel’s default behavior is to convert some text entries to dates. This makes sense for general spreadsheet use, but not for geneticists. Genes, such as Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1, have alphanumeric symbols (MARCH1) as abbreviations for their compound names. But when a scientist types “MARCH1” into an Excel spreadsheet, the software automatically interprets it as a date and converts it to “1-Mar.”

For a long time, Microsoft's position was that this was a niche issue affecting a small number of users and did not provide an option to disable automatic date conversion.

Finally, in 2023, three years after the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), the body responsible for standardizing human gene names, was forced to rename about 27 genes, such as MARCH1 to MARCHF1, to prevent misunderstandings, Microsoft released an update to disable automatic date conversion.

Vignoli also mentions that Office Open XML (OOXML) is anything but open.

Why

Microsoft Office doesn't even adhere to its own "Strict" standard, but uses a "Transitional" variant to convert older formats to OOXML. For example, the OOXML specification contains directives that require other software to clone the behavior of old, proprietary versions of Microsoft Word. There are elements like "autoSpaceLikeWord95" and "shapeLayoutLikeWW8" that directly refer to the behavior of ancient software.

The OOXML format also uses proprietary Windows metafiles for graphics instead of open, cross-platform standards like SVG.

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.