Part of the process is to input various mysterious Product Codes, and to find out what these were I downloaded a file from the MISO website. I use the Firefox browser and OpenOffice so I had assumed that opening this file would be a relatively simple process…perhaps unwisely.

Firstly, due to some quirk of the website and/or browser the file arrives with no file extension. I’m assuming it’s some kind of Microsoft Office document so I try renaming it to .xls as an Excel spreadsheet, and open it in OpenOffice Calc. This doesn’t work, as I end up with a load of XML in the spreadsheet cells. As it’s XML I wonder if it’s a newer, XML-powered Office format, so rename to .xlsx, but no, it seems that doesn’t work either. Opening up the file in a text editor shows it’s some kind of XML with Microsoft schemas abounding. At this point I tried contacting the MISO technical support department but they weren’t able to help.

A quick Google and I’ve discovered that the file is probably SpreadsheetML, a file format used before 2007 when Microsoft finally went the whole hog and embraced (well, forced everyone else to embrace) their own XML-based standard for Office documents. The latter format is something OpenOffice can easily read, so I try renaming the file as .xml and importing it. OpenOffice now tells me "OpenOffice.org requires a Java runtime environment (JRE) to perform this task. The selected JRE is defective."

This is now taking far too long. After some more research I discover what this actually means is OpenOffice needs a version of Java 6 (now discouraged by Oracle). I have to register for an Oracle account to even download it. Finally, Open Office is able to read the file and I can now fill in the original form.

If anything this process proves that central government has a long way to go towards adopting open standards and using plain, widely adopted file formats. The G-Cloud framework is a great step forward – but some of the details still need some work.

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