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Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at Last)

Posted by Soulskill on from the super-fast-turnaround dept.

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."

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Vendor lock-in now ISO-approved by denis-The-menace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yay, another format change.

    Bought for you by Microsoft.

    **History lesson: How MS got Office Open XML approved**
    MS paid the ISO membership fees for a bunch of new ISO members for that one critical ISO vote.
    The new members were so happy, they voted to approve Open XML.

    This way, the secretive and patent laden file format could be used in government bids where ISO file formats where required.

    Soon after this outrageous manoeuvre,
    ISO lost it's reputation and became known as I Sold Out.

    --
    Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
  2. Re:It will save them* by Anpheus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just tried opening up the most complicated template in Word 2013 that I could find (the annual report template looked pretty busy) and I threw some charts in with data and tried saving as Strict Open XML.

    It saved without any prompt.

  3. Re:Doubtful. by Pope+Raymond+Lama · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To whoever missed the "format wars" they are nicely (And fervently) documented on Jomar Silva's (A.K.A. Homembit) blog -
    ending at 2008-09 entries: http://homembit.com/2008/09/popular-participation-on-international-standardization-process-opening-the-black-box.html

    Jomar, a core contributor to ODF, was one of Brazil's envoy to the ISO group in which Microsoft format were aproved, trying to prevent it from happening as it went.

    --
    -><- no .sig is good sig.
  4. Re:have you ever given a presentation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a number of helpful apps for that, one of which is called open-pdf-presenter:
    https://code.google.com/p/open-pdf-presenter/

    Especially useful for latex beamer presentations :)

  5. Re:Sure... Now that it's no longer relevant... by supercrisp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, I may be no true Scotsman, but I care about the standards because it means my students can use many more word processors, and it levels the playing field for students whose parents are wealthy and for those who are not.