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An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
(blog.documentfoundation.org)
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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Back in the land of reality governments have decades of office documents Ina proprietary format that need to be delt with so any office suite at least in the beginning need to access to them as written.
It's almost as if a suite's capability to open a format is not tied to its default format.
According to the article, Euro-Office defaults to Microsoft's format, instead of .ods, so the whole "sovereignty" argument sure seems to be getting kicked down there road for later, while being used for maximum marketing.
It's just standard corner-cutting hypocrisy.
Again they have decades of documents that need to be dealt with so of course its going to default to MS format, I figured people would get that. I use Softmaker office for the exact same reason because in the real world I need to deal with the format.
Libreoffice accepts both. Why Eurooffice can't is a wonder truly worth of research
Sarcasm
I just want an excuse to have an inside look at EU's inner working on techYou are not making sense. What formats can be opened and read has nothing to do with what format the software defaults to (when writing).
It does because governments have to interact with people, companies, and governments that use MS Office. They can probably get along internally with whatever format they choose but that doesn't apply to their customers.
Seems like a good way to spread adoption of ods then!
Except it won't people will just playing the handoff game with pdf's further solo ing things down.
Euro office is doing things the right way
It would be a great way to piss people off.
There are also decades document management systems, databases and other 3rd party tools that only speak ooxml. Defaulting to odf guarantees that documents will be incompatible, which will cause unnecessary friction.
All it takes is one high up civil servant to hit this issue, say "The MS tools never did this", and the entire transition will be in jeopardy. The people using these tools want to create documents that are compatible, that is ALL they care about.
HDDVD and betamax lost the format war. So did ODF. Its time to move on.