Misadventures in Microsoftery: The Oops of OOXML

Following up on Tuesday's story about the Microsoft Mac BU's release of a beta converter for Word XML documents, we thought it might make sense to download the converter and give it a whirl for ourselves.

The download is quite large (25MB) and consists of a disk image which, when mounted, displays a single installer application. Things started none too auspiciously when we tried to run the installer and were informed, in a dialog, that the installation could not take place because Entourage was running. (Why installing a stand-alone application that merely converts a document from one format to another should be impeded by an unrelated mail application is a mystery.) This dialog offered two choices: Quit or Continue. But pressing Continue merely repeated the same dialog; it didn't quit Entourage, and was now noticing that Entourage was still running. So we quit Entourage ourselves, and pressed Continue again. No dice! Now that the dialog had got it into its head that Entourage was running, it refused to notice that this was not true.

Resisting a temptation to put our fist through the screen, we quit the installer and started it up again. This time the installer kindly permitted itself to be run. The installation procedure took a long time and consisted of thousands of files, which is a very odd way to perform an installation of a single application. Why doesn't the disk image simply contain the application, so that the user can drag it to the Applications folder?

Finally the installation completed, leaving in its wake the following pieces:

• A log file (text) in /Library/Receipts. This is blatantly incorrect behavior. Only .pkg receipt bundles should be placed in /Library/Receipts. The place for a text log file is ~/Library/Logs.

• A folder /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office Converter Support, containing ten Framework files and a Bundle file. Whether it is correct behavior to install frameworks in an Application Support folder (rather than, dare we suggest it, the Frameworks folder) is not worth debating.

• The actual application, Office Open XML Converter. This is a mere 4MB in size, and is placed, without any choice of location being given, in the Applications folder.

So, having armed ourselves with an XML Word document from a Windows machine, we started up Office Open XML Converter and proceeded to attempt to perform the conversion.

Things went badly right from the start. No amount of persuasion would get the application to see the document at all. The problem might have something to do with the fact that the application wants you to drag and drop an XML document onto it. But the XML document is not, in fact, a document; Mac OS X, not understanding the format and nature of this beast, sees it as a folder (with a .docx suffix, to be sure, but a folder nonetheless). After pushing every button in sight, changing the preferences, pushing more buttons, doing more dragging and dropping, and so forth, the application finally consented to attempt the conversion.

This took a remarkably long time. The conversion process ground away, and finally dumped into the application's Conversion Log window the following highly informative message:

=============================<br /><br /><br />

OFFICE OPEN XML CONVERTER LOG<br /><br /><br />

=============================<br /><br /><br />

Start Time: 2007-05-18 09:54:49 -0700<br /><br /><br />

Converting file: /Users/mattneub/Desktop/Sample Document.docx<br /><br /><br />

There was an error opening the file.<br /><br /><br />

End Time: 2007-05-18 09:55:00 -0700<br /><br /><br />

Conversion Failed.<br /><br /><br />

==================================<br /><br /><br />

And that was the end of that. So far, the converter is batting a great big zero for us. How about you?

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