Oliver Bell’s Weblog

My colleague Gray Knowlton has a post up on his blog this morning talking about our unwavering commitment to OpenXML as an essential component  of the Microsoft Office System.

Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping away from Open XML. Some ask… “Is Microsoft abandoning Open XML?”

In a word, no.

That should be pretty clear.

He goes on to say;

We will continue to drive adoption of the compatibility pack for Open XML, which has now surpassed 40 Million individual downloads and gaining significant uptake in large-scale deployments. We will continue to develop and ship developer tools, translators, code samples, documentation, MSDN content and other material intended to educate people on how Open XML can help them solve specific business problems. Open XML is prominently featured in many Office Business Applications.

As to why we’re waiting for Office 14 to fully support IS29500, I think Gray did an excellent job of answering this in an earlier post of his;

Office 14 will update our support for IS29500. The timing for this might seem strange, but I do hope the rationale is clear. ODF 1.1 is a completed specification. The final version of IS29500 is not published today. While we do support a significant portion of IS29500 already, the BRM changes and other issues raised in public forums will inform us on how to best move forward with IS29500… and it gives me a little time to address the compatibility considerations that will be an important part of any file format related changes in Office. ODF has a potential upside in expanding interoperability, but as always, business continuity requirements will have a significant effect on our approach to these file format changes. Our customers will accept nothing less…

On a related note, a number of blogs are talking about the release of the 11.5.0 update for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac this morning, which adds additional support for folks wanting to use OpenXML in that version of office.

Here are some of the changes;

Adds read/write compatibility for Open XML Format (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) files if installed with the Open XML Format Converter, Better stability and printing/page setup fixes for Word, Better paste compatibility with Office 2008 for all apps, Powerpoint fixes for stability with large documents

You’ll find the Microsoft KB article that talks about the release of the update here.