The talk presents the initiative “Layout-true Representation of OOXML Documents in Open Source Office Applications”. The success stories and challenges of this €140,000-funded project by Munich, Freiburg, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and other public institutions will be explained. The session shall also provide a platform to discuss how to integrate the Apache licensed OOXML filter patches.

In a unique initiative, the German cities of Munich, Freiburg im Breisgau and Jena have joined forces with the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit (FITSU) and the canton of Waadt to provide €140,000 for the further development of OOXML integration in LibreOffice/Apache Open Office. Developed as part of a workshop held in October 2011 and published in December of the same year, the specification is designed to improve the future parsing and editing of documents from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the Open Source office suites LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. Targeted improvements include the formatting of borders and images, plus tables and bulleted lists in Word (.docx) documents, correct display of comments from Word and Excel (.xlsx) and the possibility of embedding fonts in ODF and OOXML documents.

The tender document for the “Layout-true Representation of OOXML Documents in Open Source Office Applications” project was published by the Open Source Business Alliance’s Office Interoperability working group. Bids were submitted by the LibreOffice Team from SUSE and the Hamburg-based open source company Lanedo. Since the specification is split into self-contained work packages, both SUSE and Lanedo can work independently on the development tasks. Once released, the results of this work will be available below the Apache Software Licence 2.0 to all users of the free office suites LibreOffice and Apache Open Office.

The talk given by the leader of the OSB Alliance working group "Office Interoperability" will discuss the process and the current state of this initiative. The success story but also the challenges and how they have been overcome will be explained. The session shall also provide a platform to discuss with Apache Open Office developers how to integrate the OOXML filter patches programmed by the SUSE and Lanedo teams.