Office Files Move Forward -- Redmondmag.com

Barney's Blog

Office Files Move Forward

Microsoft loves controlling file formats, but as OpenDoc and OpenOffice took hold, Redmond started to lose its grip just a bit. The answer? Office Open XML (OOXML), a new XML-based file format for Office 2007 that's close, but not a perfect match, to OpenDoc.

Keeping DOCX moving forward, Microsoft announced a host of new tools, some of them open source, to broaden the reach of OOXML. One tool lets Office 2007 files be read by Java apps, another makes the file format more Web page-friendly, and yet another eases the translation between Office files and OpenDoc.

But not all is perfect in Office file land. The Office 2007 file format, based on XML, is fundamentally different. Simple documents can be passed back and forth between Office 2007 and older Offices fairly easy. But once the files get complex, corruption during translation is a real problem.

Posted by Doug Barney on 05/20/2009 at 1:16 PM

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