GNOME and OOXML

That link leads me to a site which agrees with my assessment that it's an attempt to
standardise what OpenOffice.org already does (an approach which I described as hopeless) and
has this to say about the schedule...

“Some old messages reported that we would not complete until October 2007, but that is simply
not true.”

Indeed, with only hours of October 2007 remaining as I write this I think it's safe to say
that they won't complete until some time after that, if at all. The mailing list archives just
stop, abruptly, in July with a considerable amount of unsettled business.

I'm willing to believe that there's a good faith attempt to do something useful here, but it's
too little and too late.

Let me provide some additional perspective lest people (who don't know me) should imagine I'm
a mere puppet of the Microsoft Corporation. There are a number of curious features of Excel
that make no particular sense to the modern user, yet stubbornly refuse to disappear from new
& improved versions. How did they come about? They're related to design mistakes in earlier
software, in some cases as early as 1-2-3. Excel had to maintain bug-for-bug compatibility
with some of these mistakes and now they can never practically be eliminated.

All the date-handling functionality in Excel is duplicated for two distinct systems of
measuring time. These correspond to a more or less inadvertent difference between the original
Macintosh Excel and the first Windows version. That difference is baked into every
date-handling spreadsheet and must be detected at import time, there is no way to "convert"
from one to the other without human guidance.