The other day I noticed that the traffic on my blog had increased dramatically. I couldn’t really understand why (I have not written anything substantial in quite some time) – all I could see was that the majority of the visitors originated from Google. The search results were mainly &ld...; [More]

Some time ago I wrote about some of the enhancements of Microsoft Office in terms of how far they have made it in implementing the content of the conformance profile "Strict" or "<S>". As you might recall, I made a run-through of a list of feature areas and marked each with either a green, yel... [More]

In the recent SC34 WG4-meeting in Stockholm, validators quickly became the talk of the town - so to speak. As I am sure you all know, Alex Brown made the office-o-tron some time ago - a validator targeting both ODF and OOXML in their ISO-editions. A few weeks ago I myself made a validator - but mine... [More]

The question of “is this a valid document?” is tricky. At the end of the day it comes down to the description in the conformance clauses of the specification of the document being considered. The conformance clauses of OOXML is listed in Section 2 of Part 1 and Section 2 of Part 4. There... [More]

On January 29th the Danish politicians finally got their acts together and did something about open document formats. After almost 3 years of debate and endless dragging of their feet - a consensus and agreement was finally made on that Friday. The agreement made had this content: For use in the p... [More]

Some time ago I wrote a bit about what Microsoft Office had managed to get into Microsoft Office 2010 CTP1 (or, I wrote about the stuff I had tested). As you might recall, the results were rather slim, so I wrote to Microsoft to hear, if that was really it. It has been the fear of many that Microsof... [More]

Some time ago I did some tests of Excel in Microsoft Office 2010 (CTP). The test was around OOXML - but test of ODF-support was missing. One of the things ODF is missing but is in OOXML is the leap-year-bug ... although most of propably don't miss it all that much. The leap-year-bug is the good ol'... [More]

Every time you use a tool, you make a (conscious) decision to trust that tool to do what it says. This is true for closed source software and open source software alike (especially if you don't have the skills to plow through the source of whatever tool you use). Most people use a generic blogging ... [More]

I have been looking at how Excel 2010 has implemented various features using ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 - also known as "OOXML Transitional". Background: ISO/IEC comes in two variants, a "transitional" (T) and a "strict (S). Transitional is the one containing all the legacy stuff such as VML, legacy dig... [More]

Back in the day when I started blogging, I showed a friend of mine a blog post I had written. He noticed the large number of links to other bloggers in the piece, and he asked me (tongue-in-cheek) if those links were some kind of geeky way of saying "I love you" to the people I linked to. Well, to ... [More]