If you visit this page on Microsoft's website, you can download a white paper that describes "how the appearance of an Office 2000 file, saved as a Web page (.htm), changes when viewed on different Web browsers." (Actually, it's an .exe which will install the document on your system—it's not even a self-extracting archive. One way or another, you'll need a PC to view it if you go to their site. For comparison purposes, I have made the original document available here.)

In Microsoft's defense, they say on the page that the document "can be opened by either Word 97 or Word 2000." I checked it out in both Word 97 on Windows 95 and Word 2000 on Windows 2000 and yes, it looks fine in both. It falls apart a bit in the just-released OpenOffice version 1.0 (identical results in OpenOffice in Windows and Linux, I'd like top point out), but what's really funny is that it's even worse when viewed in Word 98, 2001, or X on a Mac! These screenshots show the same part of the document in each version I tested. At the bottom of the sixth page there is a table, a four line * footnote, and a two line ** footnote. The first line of the next page should say "Excel".

OpenOffice doesn't display the "Browser Compatibility" footer properly and drops the two line second ** footnote onto the next page. Also, there are some font differences between the Windows and Linux versions. But, look at Microsoft's products on Mac OS: Word 2001 and X drop both footnotes onto the next page and Word 98 even puts some of the table onto the following page!

This is not Apple's fault. They don't develop Office, Microsoft does, and if Microsoft chooses to ignore cross-platform compatibility, that's their choice. I just put this page together because I often hear people say "I don't want to use OpenOffice/StarOffice/AbiWord/whatever because it's not 100% compatible with MS Office" and I wanted to point out that MS Office itself is not 100% compatible with MS Office! It irks me just as much when vendors say their products are "Fully compatible with... Microsoft Office" because that's not quite true. If MS can't be compatible with themselves, it is almost by definition impossible for anyone else to be. In practice, it is impossible, since they don't have access to Microsoft's code.

So, check out these pics and go download Open Office. (OpenOffice version 1.0 is available for Windows and Linux; a Mac OS X version is in development.) It is also worth noticing that not only is the product itself open-source, its file formats are open and publicly documented. In fact, all they are is zipped XML! Try this: compose and save a document with Open Office—Calc, Writer, whatever. Quit the application and rename the file, replacing its extension with .zip. Now, unzip it. Voilà—plain-text, readable-by-anything, XML!

Click the images for full-size (1024x768) versions.
MS Office 2000, Windows 2000	OpenOffice 1.0, Windows 2000	OpenOffice 1.0, RedHat Linux 7.1 & KDE
Word 98, Mac OS 9.1	Word 2001, Mac OS 9.1	Word X, Mac OS X 10.1.5

[Brian Ashe's home page] [brianashe.com/linux]