Microsoft Want To Standardize Office Formats

[jedipi 0]

Microsoft intends to submit file formats for its new Office 12 applications
to the European standards body ECMA International early next month.

The document formats is called Microsoft Office Open XML.
XML document formats is available in Office 2003.
And in Office 12, it will save documents by default in the Open XML format.

Microsoft will change the license in order to remove all the barriers for developers working with the file formats.

I think that's a good news.
If the document formats is Standardized, i can exchange my assignment without any worry.
But, how about other openformat???

http://news.a.com.com/

[abhiram 0]

What? Microsoft is actually using the word 'Open'? Does this mean that Openoffice, KOffice and the likes will be able to save documents in Office formats without any loss in quality or structure? That would be great. The only reason I still need MS Office is because it's used by everyone in campus and saving it in MS Office format in Openoffice gives a slightly different output when viewed in MS Office.

[qwijibow 0]

My university was very strict about formats you used to hand in assignments.They prefered you to hand in your document as PDF. (but plain text / openOffice was tolerated)Once a first year student was publically flogged foe using MS .doc