Oliver Bell’s Weblog

The compatibility pack comes up in conversation pretty frequently these days, in past years when Microsoft has upgraded to a new file format users of older versions of office products have had to deal with some well document issues when files are sent to them in the newer format.

With the advent of Open XML and the implementation that we have in Office 2007 Microsoft took one further step and delivered a piece of code that we call the “Compatibility Pack for Open XML”. The compatibility pack provides functionality for users of Office 2003 and Office XP that allows them to work with Open XML files without any need to upgrade to newer versions of Office. 

The program owner for this work in Microsoft is a lead by the name of Gray Knowlton, some of you will have met him as he got involved in several technical discussions around the region, including the technical workshop in New Zealand last August.

Gray has a wealth of knowledge in the office productivity and file formats space, he has spent a few years with Microsoft now and before that was with Adobe working in similar areas. A couple of weeks ago somebody finally managed to talk Gray into starting his own blog, he is more of a product type and less of a standards type so we should start to see some useful info from him around the impact of Open XML and related technologies.

One of his first posts covers the download stats of the compatibility pack, mentioning that we just passed a milestone of 20 million successful downloads.

In many of the public debates that I have participated in around Open XML I frequently get told that Open XML isn’t being adopted, the example cited is usually based on the number of DOCX files Google has indexed or some similar measure. Given that most users are more likely going to be using the files produced by Microsoft Office inside of a firewall, then if the document is going to be used externally converting them PDF or some other publishing format, these numbers from Google and other search engines are not really much of a surprise or of much real use.

Watching the download counters on the compatibility pack, the converter projects on Sourceforge and a number of other real metrics does show us that the usage of Open XML is high, users are choosing to install the compatibility pack to either create and manage Open XML documents of their own or to exchange documents with the many millions of users of Office 2007, other office and other software packages that support Open XML that are out there now.

Anyway, Gray’s post on the topic is a lot more interesting than mine, if you want to have a read for yourself it is linked here, and I’ve copied a small excerpt below;

We decided to make it available as a manual download, and not as an automatic update, and during the first 12 months of its release, the compatibility pack has been successfully downloaded over 20 million times. This means that 20 million people have elected to manually download this 26.2MB software to their computer. This is a significant number of people adding Open XML to their environment.

Now is a good time to get past the denial phase that some quarters still seem to be stuck in and accept that Open XML, like PDF, ODF and a number of other office document formats have broad adoption in the market today.

Standardizing Open XML alongside these other formats provides a strong base from which we can collectively start to look at conversations such as interoperability and document fidelity in a way that will help our mutual customers.