Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at Last)

Andy Updegrove writes "Between 2005 and 2008, an unparalleled standards war was waged between Microsoft, on the one hand, and IBM, Google, Oracle and additional companies on the other. At the heart of the battle were two document formats, one called ODF, developed by OASIS, a standards development consortium, and Open XML, a specification developed by Microsoft. Both were submitted to, and adopted by, global standards groups ISO/IEC. But then Microsoft never fully adopted its own standard. Instead, it implemented what it called 'Transitional Open XML,' which was better adapted for use in connection with documents created using older versions of Office. Yesterday, Microsoft announced in a blog entry that it will finally make it possible for Office users to open, edit and save documents in the format that ISO/IEC approved."

Comments

It will save them*

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning:
Features you have chosen in this document
are not compatible with OpenXML,
for best results please save in Microsoft format,
you may lose work if you continue.

[save in Word Format ][cancel][continue]

Sure... Now that it's no longer relevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile ODF already has a huge seven year foothold, and all of this time the format and its applications have been in production use, and have become more and more robust.

Sure it will

[killmenow]

It'll be fully compatible. It'll just be one big block like this:

<![CDATA[...]]>