Excel has a thing for getting dates wrong (the (in)famous 1900 leap-year bug, inherited from Lotus 1-2-3 and never fixed), and when Excel gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse.

[bjoern@social.schiessle.eu]

Excel has a thing for getting dates wrong (the (in)famous 1900 leap-year bug, inherited from Lotus 1-2-3 and never fixed), and when Excel gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse. [..] The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee was forced in 2020 to rename dozens of human genes – including SEPT1 and MARCH1 – because Excel kept silently converting their symbols to dates. Rather than going to Microsoft and demanding a bug fix, scientists preferred to throw years of established nomenclature down the drain to avoid upsetting Redmond

I really like these two examples, not because of the issues as such, but as two examples of how people usually handle bugs in proprietary software: ignore them or work around them, but almost never complain about the software.

MS Office is always mentioned as the standard, and everything has to be as good as MS Office if people consider different solutions. But in the end, it's not because MS is so much better. People are just used to it and how to work around strange issues that they would never accept in a Free Software solution.

There is no digital sovereignty without ODF - TDF Community Blog

Any other choice is a choice of dependence on a single vendor Digital sovereignty begins with the document format. Everything else – server location, hosting jurisdiction, procurement clauses – is downstream of this single decision. If the format is standard and open, the user controls the document. If the format is proprietary the vendor controls it, even when the file sits on the user’s own hard drive. This is why LibreOffice, and its derivatives such as Collabora Office and Online, are today the only legitimate choice for governments, supranational bodies, businesses and organisations that want to protect the digital freedom of their users. Only software based on the LibreOffice source code – the LibreOffice Technology – uses ODF as its native document format. Every document saved, stored, retained and exchanged in ODF remains the exclusive property of its author, and remains so over the years. ODF – Open Document Format, as the name says – was designed and developed in accordance with the characteristics of a true open standard: clearly documented, transparently developed by an independent body, properly versioned, built on existing standards, and stored in XML files that any user can read. None of this applies to OOXML. The

TDF Community Blog (blog.documentfoundation.org)

#OpenStandards #ODF #OOXML #Microsoft #Office #FreeSoftware