FAQ: Office 14 and Microsoft's support for ODF

Computerworld - Changes were made to Office Open XML between Ecma International's approval of the file format as a standard a year and a half ago and the ISO standards body's ratification of it this spring. Microsoft Corp. won't support the ISO version of its own format until Office 14 arrives around the end of 2009. Is this a big deal, as Microsoft critics such as attorney and blogger Andy Updegrove claim?

Burton Group analyst Guy Creese, who as some of you might recall co-authored a controversial white paper earlier this year predicting that OOXML would win the file format battle with ODF, agrees with Microsoft's critics.

"I think Microsoft is taking too long," he said. "I can't imagine that they wouldn't support it sooner if they could, so there must be some significant work required."

On the other hand, Creese says that the differences between the various versions of OOXML are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty small. They're much smaller than the differences between OOXML and an older binary format, such as Office 2003 or Office 2000. And most users don't worry much about losing data when resaving between those formats (though document archivists and power users working with complex forms or macros might have problems).

Creese also points out that since OOXML is, obviously, based on human-readable XML rather than on binary characters, the "chances of information ever becoming unrecoverable are a lot less."

These developments naturally trigger other questions:

Well, can Microsoft at least provide support sooner for the version of OOXML that Ecma submitted to ISO back in January? That earlier version is most notable for better graphics rendering and backward compatibility. But according to a spokeswoman, Microsoft has no plans to support it sooner.

Why did Microsoft belatedly support ODF and PDF? Not to woo consumers, for whom ODF and PDF support are nice-to-have but not essential features, but to ensure that Microsoft Office remains acceptable to governments, which exercise their power as huge buyers of technology as well as policymakers.

For instance, Belgium, the Netherlands and South Africa have all said they favor using ODF today, especially because Microsoft Office doesn't yet support the ISO-approved version of OOXML.

In the U.S., both Minnesota and the state of New York recently came out in favor of open document formats, though neither spoke explicitly of supporting ODF or OOXML.

With its move, "if a government says ODF is our standard, then Microsoft can say, 'It's our standard, too,' " Creese said.

But why isn't Microsoft committing to ODF 1.2? It's supposed to have better accessibility and spreadsheet features than ODF 1.1. It is already in the OpenOffice 3.0 beta, is expected to be finalized by OASIS this fall and is on target to be ratified by ISO next summer.