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A Quick Glance at The Ms Office 2007 File Formats

Posted by dcparris on · 12 comments
LXer Newswire; By salparadise 		Mail this story
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LXer Feature - 5-June-06

Being a curious chap with a fast connection and nothing to do for a couple of hours I went and got myself a copy of the Office 2007 Demo (Beta 2). There's a new look to everything. Word which I looked at mostly has changed a lot. There's an interesting twist in the story though.

Apart from the completely redesigned interface of Word. It saves, by default to a file format .docx This is described on the Microsoft site as

Office Open XML format (.docx)

www.microsoft.com/interop/ecmaTC45/ooxml_draft13.mspx

This quote is from the above page:
"The following organizations have participated in the work of Ecma TC45 and their contributions are gratefully acknowledged:

Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, and Toshiba"

Guess what folks, docx doesn't work with OpenOffice or KWord. Abiword did open the .docx I was using (which was the "license_eN-US" from OpenOffice Win install files) but rendered it as 36 pages of mostly blank pages with lots of funny looking symbols here and there.


The docx file showed up on gnome as a compressed file, within is a [Content_Types].xml file (with a time stamp of 01 January 1980) and three folders. Two of these folders contain xml files that are open and editable. The third folder is called _rels and contains a file called .rels which gnome does not recognise. There's another one of these in the "word" folder.

On the following site http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/06/AdvancedBasic... Microsoft talk about being able to edit the contents of a document by editing the "core.xml" file which is where the body of your/the text exists. So it's sort of open. Apart from the rels files.

The Microsoft 2007 Office preview site says the following.
Q. Why is Microsoft offering a new standard, rather than simply supporting the file format for the Open Office product (sometimes called ODF)?

A. The OpenDocument format would not meet requirements for backward compatibility, for forward compatibility, or for performance, that millions of Microsoft customers tell us that they require.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/itpro/ecmafaq.mspx

Office 2007 (Word 2007) as it is now, does not open .odt files. It says they are corrupt and cannot be opened. It then says it found some "readable regions" and would you like Word to display them "if I trusted the source" so I said Yes. Word did something in the background for a while and then displayed a blank page. Ah, that would be the "readable regions" then I expect. Nice one.

All in all it seems Microsoft have invented a new standard that (presumably) won't work in Word 97 (?) or possibly 2000 either, as Microsoft say the xml format has (only) been in Office "since Office 2003".

I downloaded the ECMA report in pdf format to see what it said. It's 4081 pages long.

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Comments (12)

The report

sbenitezb ·
Can you download the report in .doc format and still open it? ;)
salparadise ·
No, it's only available in docx and pdf format. (As far as I can see).

worthless

maggrand ·
Well that makes the Office suit pretty worthless for every country in the world. Only two choises exist. Migrate to some application that suppord ODF. Or invest heavy and write documents from scratch in MS Office and loose money and time.
jimf ·
In the days that MS was in control of the situation, they would just release a new .doc version and tell everyone to get on board. That's been a lot more iffy as they went on from office 2000, and many outfits still spec that doc version as a standard. I see a lot of people being very leery of going to a 'new' format, especially if it may not be generally accepted by business and government.

I think the choice that will be considered in business are going to be stay with the older and proven .doc format, or go with ODF as it gains acceptance as a standard. .docx, as an unproven proprietary dark horse, Doesn't stand a chance.
dcparris Story submitter ·
Keep in mind the author was only examining what works now. Office 2007 isn't out yet, and these FOSS apps may work to support it. However, Abiword is definitely unlikely to support it real soon. Sooo...
jimf ·
A whole lot of this depends on how quickly Governments and Business accept ODF as a standard.
hkwint ·
Jimf: Not only that, also how soon and in what manner the ODF plugin for MS Office 2007 will be available I guess. I did send a mail to opendocument.us asking when, where and under which conditions the plug in would be available, but sadly I didn't receive an answer.
jimf ·
> also how soon and in what manner the ODF plugin for MS Office 2007 will be available

I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.
dcparris Story submitter ·
It's supposed to already be available. Supposedly, they're just working out the distribution details. To be honest, that smells kind of fishy to me.
jimf ·
Bet it doesn't get released until MS has no other options and find thay can't even give away their .docx .

So...?

mvermeer ·
"...4081 pages long" and what did it say about the .rels file?
salparadise ·
It describes them in may places throughout the report. They are "relationship" files as far as I can see. The only remaining (somewhat rhetorical) question is, why make that bit of the file unreadable by other word applications?

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