Re: OpenDocument Spreadsheet support on Gnumeric && INdT collaboration

[Morten Welinder <mwelinder gmail com>]

>     I've read Morten's blog entry on which he comments about the OASIS
> OpenDocument standard, and appreciated it very much from start to end.

Thanks.  (That would be http://blogs.gnome.org/view/mortenw/2005/06/16/0
for reference.)

>     Unfortunately, as it happens with the AbiWord filter, we do not have
> the necessary resources to work on both OpenDocument Spreadsheet *and*
> OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet support on Gnumeric.

Here are your choices:

* Use xls.  Yes, it's binary, bloated ans awful, but it's there and no-one can
   afford to ignore it.  You get interoperability.

* Use OpenOffice's format.  You get interoperability with OOo-calc, but probably
   only until such time they cut the link to this format.

* Use OpenDocument.  I believe this is a white elephant: there is no reference
   implementation to answer interpretation problems and the formulas level
   is not specified.  On top of this, it is H-U-G-E.  Prediction: everyone will
   implement their own quite small subset and interoperability will be very
   poor.

>     Last, but not least, I would like to know if there is someone
> actively working on such plugin, so we can avoid duplicate work. Our
> time frame to start is "immediately", meaning that we are already
> working on this plugin, as I write this email.

There is something in gnumeric/plugins/openoffice/.

Morten