Jack Schofield blogs on The Guardian website that Microsoft are to expand their support of open file formats in Office. Next year’s service pack will bring XPS, PDF, PDF/A, ODF, and (in a sign of the increasing importance of Chinese business) the Chinese national file format UOF as standard. Additionally, the next version of Office will include updates to OOXML to reflect changes in the specification during the ISO approval process.

This is great news for open source, with the formats not only being natively supported but Microsoft also adding the ability to set them to be the default. While DOC and DOCX won’t disappear any time soon, this little sliver of openness is at least progress for a company which is famously closed-source.

The full blog post is here.

Posted Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 @ 9:36 pm
Filed in business and productivity, copyright and drm, science and tech

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