Microsoft Office To Use Open File Formats

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Microsoft has announced that the default file formats for Microsoft Office will be non-proprietary and open. They will be based on XML, and as well as being supported in the forthcoming Office 12, Microsoft will also release add-ons to make them usable by Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003.

I remember asking Microsoft for non-proprietary file formats back in the early 1990s – in the days when I was a customer representative in the X/Open consortium (now The Open Group). At the time, we thought such formats would probably be based on HTML, but it wasn’t until the advent of XML that the dream really became a practical possibility.

Microsoft sort of toyed with the idea of XML-based formats in Office 2003, but as Owen Allan points out in his blog, a) they aren’t the default file formats and b) they create huge files "Some word documents that were saved in the XML file format were so large that they had their own weather systems".

Channel 9 has a video interview with Brian Jones, a Program Manager for Microsoft Word, talking about the new format. He also has an entry on his own blog talking about the new format, with pointers to more technical information. 

With all the hoopla going on about this, I do find it interesting that no-one from the Microsoft camp seems to have referred to the Open Document Format initiative of the EU Commission. Even Microsoft’s press release claims that the reason they are doing this is to make it "easier for companies to adopt Office 12". Not a mention by Steve Sinofsky about the ODF initiative, despite that fact that he has been in correspondence with the EU Commission about it. I suppose that he didn’t want to admit that European governments, in particular, are likely to require open document formats as a basis for doing business with them.

The ODF initiative led to the setting up of a technical committee in OASIS to develop an XML-based Open Document Format. They delivered version 1.0 of the specification last month. I’m sure the timing of the me-too Microsoft announcement is pure coincidence. So now we will have two XML-based open document formats going forward. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to build a bridge between them.