Office Open XML or OpenDocument format for Office 2010?

[Deisel Weisel]

Just installed Office 2010, and it now wants me to choose between these two formats. Having done a bit of reading up on the subject, I'm still clueless.

I?m a small business. Want to avoid any potential compatibility issues, obviously. I?ve got about 100,000+ customer excel files in Excel 97, on another PC that will need importing over to this new PC.

What do I go for?

[xn--bya]

Go for Office Open XML, as it is the native format for MS Office and so you can use all of the features of Office with it.

[+Byt Subscriber¹]

I always go for XML.

Had compatability problems with other Open Documents.

[MS Bob 11]

Open XML because it supports Office features 100%. Only if you use LibreOffice, use ODF.

[Marbux]

Unless you want compatibility only with other users of Office 2010, the answer to your question is neither ODF nor OOXML. Instead, set the defaults via forced policy to the 97-2003 binary formats, i.e., .doc, .xls, .ppt.

Among the problems you will encounter with OOXML is the fact that users of earlier versions of Office will be unable to open OOXML documents generated by Office 2010. This is part of Microsoft's well-known "upgrade treadmill" strategy, with the underlying driver that people weary of not being able to open files generated by others using newer versions, so are compelled to pay for a license to use the newest version. That approach treats Microsoft users as sheep to be fleeced; there is no technical barrier to providing both backward and forward support of file formats. E.g., any document generated by any version of WordPerfect from v. 6 through 15 can be processed without data loss by any of those versions. The techniques for doing so are well understood.

The Office 97-2003 binary formats, on the other hand, were successfully decoded by competitors. Then as a result of antitrust litigation in the European Union, Microsoft published the specifications for those formats. Most major competitors now do a very decent job of reading and writing the 97-2003 binary formats. This is not the case with OOXML; e.g., some competitors offer OOXML import and have no option to export to that format, since a document may be returned to an MS Office user in the 97-2003 binary format.

The largest drawback to this approach I am aware of is that some features that are new in Office 2010 are not supported by the 97-2003 binary formats.

It should be understood that Microsoft does not provide conforming support for the official international standard ISO/IEC:29500 Office Open XML formats, but only for its own private variants. Several national standards bodies representatives in the ISO/IEC body that approved OOXML as an international standard have spoken out, saying that Microsoft had promised to support ISO/IEC:29500 in Office 2010 in order to secure approval of the standard, but then reneged on the promise. By using the Office 2010 OOXML formats, you add to the sea of documents in circulation that do not conform with the relevant international standard, making it more difficult for the international standard to gain support.

OpenDocument Formats ("ODF") are in a similar mess. Reliable interoperability of different ODF implementing programs has never been demonstrated. As with OOXML, the ODF specification is so grossly under-specified that standard-based interoperability cannot be achieved, although a number of office suites that are all derived from OpenOffice.org do passably well at exchanging documents (by definition, this is not interoperability because it is not the exchange of data between *different* data processing systems).. But Microsoft's implementation of ODF is grossly incompatible with the ODF generated by OpenOffice.org and its derivatives. ODF documents cannot be reliably exchanged between MS Office and OOo+derivatives without data loss.

In short, unless you have a compelling need to use ODF or OOXML, I strongly recommend going with the Office 97-2003 binary formats to optimize compatibility. They are the real-life de facto standard.

BTW, one of those who commented said that OOXML "is the native format for MS Office." That is incorrect. The binary formats are the native formats, the dump to file of the in-memory binary representation of a document. OOXML support is via plugin add-ons that convert between the native format and OOXML.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D.

Universal Interoperability Council