User:Thumperward/Office Open XML

Not to be confused with OpenOffice.org XML (a deprecated format used by early versions of OpenOffice.org), or Microsoft Office XML formats (deprecated formats used by earlier versions of Microsoft Office).

Office Open XML Document

File:X-office-document.svg
Filename extension	.docx or .docm
Internet media type	application/vnd. openxmlformats-officedocument. wordprocessingml. document
Developed by	Microsoft, Ecma, ISO/IEC
Type of format	Document file format
Extended from	XML, DOC, WordProcessingML
Standard(s)	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500
Website	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500:2008

Office Open XML Presentation

File:X-office-presentation.svg
Filename extension	.pptx
Internet media type	application/vnd. openxmlformats-officedocument. presentationml. presentation
Developed by	Microsoft, Ecma, ISO/IEC
Type of format	Presentation
Extended from	XML, PPT
Standard(s)	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500
Website	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500:2008

Office Open XML Workbook

File:X-office-spreadsheet.svg
Filename extension	.xlsx
Internet media type	application/vnd. openxmlformats-officedocument. spreadsheetml. sheet
Developed by	Microsoft, Ecma, ISO/IEC
Type of format	Spreadsheet
Extended from	XML, XLS, SpreadsheetML
Standard(s)	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500
Website	ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500:2008

Office Open XML (also referred to as OOXML, or Open XML) is a file format for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. An Office Open XML file is a ZIP-compatible OPC package containing XML documents and other resources. Office Open XML standard is an IEC/ISO standard; the specification is freely available from ISO for individual and non-redistributable use only.

Microsoft originally developed the specification as a successor to its earlier binary and Office 2003 XML file formats. and in 2005 submitted it to Ecma International Technical Committee TC45, where it was standardized as ECMA-376 in 2006. In April 2008, after incorporating the proposed changes from JTC 1 members during the standardization process of Office Open XML a revised version of the specification was approved as International Standard ISO/IEC 29500:2008, published in November 2008, and as ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats - 2nd edition (December 2008).

Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Open XML file formats (ECMA-376) have become the default file format of Microsoft Office. However, due to the changes introduced in a later version, Office 2007 is not entirely in compliance with ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has stated that the planned Microsoft Office 2010 will be the first version to implement the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 compliant version of Office Open XML.

Background

Prior to the 2007 edition, the core applications of the Microsoft Office software suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) by default stored their data in binary files. Historically, these files were difficult for other applications to interoperate with, due to the lack of publicly available information. Before 2007 Microsoft offered these binary format specifications under a royalty-free license and since 2007 the formats are directly downloadable from their site under a 'covenant not to sue' as part of its Open Specification Promise. Due to Microsoft previously keeping their file formats secret, other office software had great difficulty obtaining full levels of interoperability. Microsoft came under increasing pressure to adopt an open file format, in particular several nations adopted rules that official documents should be in an open format.

In 2000, Microsoft released an initial version of an XML-based format for Microsoft Excel, which was incorporated in Office XP. In 2002, a new file format for Microsoft Word followed. The Excel and Word formats – known as the Microsoft Office XML formats – were later incorporated into the 2003 release of Microsoft Office.

In May 2004, governments and the European Union recommended to Microsoft that they publish and standardize their XML Office formats through a standardization organization. Microsoft announced in November 2005 that it would standardize the new version of their XML-based formats through Ecma International, as "Ecma Office Open XML".

Standardization

Main article: Standardization of Office Open XML

Office Open XML was standardized first by Ecma International as ECMA-376 (published 7 December 2006). This standard was then fast-tracked in the Joint Technical Committee 1 of ISO and IEC where it became an International Standard, ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (published November 2008).

Licensing

Reasonable and Non Discriminatory

Ecma International provides specifications that "can be freely copied by all interested parties without restrictions". Under the Ecma International code of conduct in patent matters, participating and approving member organisations are required to make available their patent rights on a Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND) basis. While making patent rights available on a RAND basis is considered a common minimum patent condition for a standard, international standardization has a clear preference for royalty-free patent licensing. That is why Microsoft, a main contributor to the standard, provided a Covenant Not to Sue for its patent licensing. The covenant received a mixed reception, with some (like the Groklaw blog) identifying problems and others (such as Lawrence Rosen, an attorney and lecturer at Stanford Law School) endorsing it.

Open Specification Promise

Main article: Open Specification Promise

Microsoft has added the format to their Open Specification Promise in which

"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification [...]"

subject to certain restrictions. Office Open XML can therefore be used under the Covenant Not to Sue or the Open Specification Promise.

The Open Specification Promise was included in documents submitted to ISO in support of the ECMA-376 fast track submission. Ecma International asserted that, "The OSP enables both open source and commercial software to implement [the specification]."

File format and structure

File:Open XML main components.svg

Office Open XML main components

Office Open XML uses a file package conforming to the Open Packaging Conventions. This format uses mechanisms from the ZIP file format and contains the individual files that form the basis of the document. In addition to Office markup, the package can also include embedded files such as images, videos, or other documents.

Document markup languages

An Office Open XML file may contain several documents encoded in specialized markup languages corresponding to applications within the Microsoft Office product line. Office Open XML defines multiple vocabularies using 27 namespaces and 89 schema modules.

The primary markup languages are:

• WordprocessingML for word-processing
• SpreadsheetML for spreadsheets
• PresentationML for presentations

Shared markup language materials include:

• Office Math Markup Language (OMML)
• DrawingML used for vector drawing, charts, and for example, text art (additionally, though deprecated, VML is supported for drawing)
• Extended properties
• Custom properties
• Variant Types
• Custom XML data properties
• Bibliography

In addition to the above markup languages custom XML schemas can be used to extend Office Open XML.

The XML Schema of Office Open XML emphasizes reducing load time and improving parsing speed. In a test with applications current in April 2007, XML-based office documents were slower to load than binary formats. To enhance performance, Office Open XML uses very short element names for common elements and spreadsheets save dates as index numbers (starting from 1899 or from 1904). In order to be systematic and generic, Office Open XML typically uses separate child elements for data and metadata (element names ending in Pr for properties) rather than using multiple attributes, which allows structured properties. Office Open XML does not use mixed content but uses elements to put a series of text runs (element name r) into paragraphs (element name p). The result is terse and highly nested in contrast to HTML, for example, which is fairly flat, designed for humans to write in text editors and is more congenial for humans to read.

Office MathML (OMML)

Office Math Markup Language is a mathematical markup language which can be embedded in WordprocessingML, with intrinsic support for including word processing markup like revision markings, footnotes, comments, images and elaborate formatting and styles. The OMML format is different from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) MathML recommendation that does not support those office features, but is partially compatible through XSL Transformations.

The following Office MathML example defines the fraction: <math>\frac{\pi}{2}</math>

<source lang="xml"> <m:oMathPara>

 <m:oMath>
   <m:f>
     <m:num><m:r>
       <m:t>π</m:t>
     </m:r></m:num>
     <m:den><m:r>
       <m:t>2</m:t>
     </m:r></m:den>
   </m:f>
 </m:oMath>

</m:oMathPara> </source>

DrawingML

File:DrawingML example.png

Example of DrawingML charts

DrawingML is the vector graphics markup language used in Office Open XML documents. Its major features are the graphics rendering of text elements, graphical vector-based shape elements, graphical tables and charts.

The DrawingML table is the third table model in Office Open XML (next to the table models in WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML) and is optimized for graphical effects and its main use is in presentations created with PresentationML markup. DrawingML contains graphics effects (like shadows and reflection) that can be used on the different graphical elements that are used in DrawingML. In DrawingML you can also create 3d effects, for instance to show the different graphical elements through a flexible camera viewpoint. It is possible to create separate DrawingML theme parts in an Office Open XML package. These themes can then be applied to graphical elements throughout the Office Open XML package.

DrawingML is unrelated to the other vector graphics formats such as SVG. These can be converted to DrawingML to include natively in an Office Open XML document. This is a different approach to that of the OpenDocument format, which uses a subset of SVG, and includes vector graphics as separate files.

A DrawingML graphic's dimensions are specified in English Metric Units (EMUs). It is so called because it allows an exact common representation of dimensions originally in either English or Metric units. This unit is defined as 1/360,000 of a centimeter and thus there are 914,400 EMUs per inch, and 12,700 EMUs per point. This unit was chosen so that integers can be used to accurately represent most dimensions encountered in a document. Floating point cannot accurately represent a fraction that is not a sum of powers of two and the error is magnified when the fractions are added together many times, resulting in misalignment. As an inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters, or 127/50, 1/127 inch is an integer multiple of a power-of-ten fraction of the meter (2×10^-4 m). To accurately represent (with an integer) 1 μm = 10^-6 m, a divisor of 100 is further needed. To accurately represent the point unit, a divisor of 72 is needed, which also allows divisions by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, and 36 to be accurate. Multiplying these together gives 127×72×100 = 914,400 units per inch; this also allows exact representations of multiples of 1/100 & 1/32 inch. According to Rick Jelliffe, programmer and standards activist (ISO, W3C, IETF), EMUs are a rational solution to a particular set of design criteria.

Container structure

Main article: Open Packaging Conventions

File:Open Packaging Convention.png

Container structure of Part 2 of the Ecma Office Open XML standard, ECMA-376

Office Open XML documents are stored in Open Packaging Convention (OPC) packages, which are ZIP files containing XML and other data files, along with a specification of the relationships between them. Depending on the type of the document, the packages have different internal directory structures and names. An application will use the relationships files to locate individual sections (files), with each having accompanying metadata, in particular MIME metadata.

A basic package contains an XML file called [Content_Types].xml at the root, along with three directories: _rels, docProps, and a directory specific for the document type (for example, in a .docx word processing package, there would be a word directory). The word directory contains the document.xml file which is the core content of the document.

[Content_Types].xml

This file provided MIME type information for parts of the package, using defaults for certain file extensions and overrides for parts specificied by IRI.

_rels

This directory contains relationships for the files within the package. To find the relationships for a specific file, look for the _rels directory that is a sibling of the file, and then for a file that has the original file name with a .rels appended to it. For example, if the content types file had any relationships, there would be a file called [Content_Types].xml.rels inside the _rels directory.

_rels/.rel

This file is where the package relationships are located. Applications look here first. Viewing in a text editor, one will see it outlines each relationship for that section. In a minimal document containing only the basic document.xml file, the relationships detailed are metadata and document.xml.

docProps/core.xml

This file contains the core properties for any Office Open XML document.

word/document.xml

This file is the main part for any Word document.

Relationships

Relationship files in Office Open XML

An example relationship file (word/_rels/document.xml.rels), is:

<source lang="xml"> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?> <Relationships

 xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/package/2005/06/relationships">
 <Relationship Id="rId1"
   Type="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/relationships/image"
   Target="http://en.wikipedia.org/images/wiki-en.png"
   TargetMode="External" />
 <Relationship Id="rId2"
   Type="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/relationships/hyperlink"
   Target="http://www.wikipedia.org"
   TargetMode="External" />

</Relationships> </source>

As such, images referenced in the document can be found in the relationship file by looking for all relationships that are of type http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/relationships/image. To change the used image, edit the relationship.

Hyperlink relations

The following code shows an example of inline markup for a hyperlink:

<source lang="xml"> <w:hyperlink r:id="rId2" w:history="1"

 xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships"
 xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main">

</source>

In this example, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is represented by "rId2". The actual URL is in the accompanying relationships file, located by the corresponding "rId2" item. Linked images, templates, and other items are referenced in the same way.

Embedded or linked media file relations

Pictures can be embedded or linked using a tag:

<source lang="xml"> <v:imagedata w:rel="rId1" o:title="example" /> </source>

This is the reference to the image file. All references are managed via relationships. For example, a document.xml has a relationship to the image. There is a _rels directory in the same directory as document.xml, inside _rels is a file called document.xml.rels. In this file there will be a relationship definition that contains type, ID and location. The ID is the referenced ID used in the XML document. The type will be a reference schema definition for the media type and the location will be an internal location within the ZIP package or an external location defined with a URL.

Document properties

Office Open XML uses the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and DCMI Metadata Terms to store document properties. Dublin Core is a standard for cross-domain information resource description and is defined in ISO 15836:2003.

Core properties

An example document properties file (docProps/core.xml) that uses Dublin Core metadata, is:

<source lang="xml"> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <cp:coreProperties xmlns:cp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/metadata/core-properties"

 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 xmlns:dcmitype="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
 <dc:title>Office Open XML</dc:title>
 <dc:subject>File format and structure</dc:subject>
 <dc:creator>Wikipedia</dc:creator>
 <cp:keywords>Office Open XML, Metadata, Dublin Core</cp:keywords>
 <dc:description>Office Open XML uses ISO 15836:2003</dc:description>
 <cp:lastModifiedBy>Wikipedia</cp:lastModifiedBy>
 <cp:revision>1</cp:revision>
 <dcterms:created xsi:type="dcterms:W3CDTF">2008-06-19T20:00:00Z</dcterms:created>
 <dcterms:modified xsi:type="dcterms:W3CDTF">2008-06-19T20:42:00Z</dcterms:modified>
 <cp:category>Document file format</cp:category>
 <cp:contentStatus>Final</cp:contentStatus>

</cp:coreProperties> </source>

Structure of the standard

ISO/IEC 29500:2008

The ISO/IEC standard is structured into four parts, each of which are independent standards. Part 2 specifying Open Packaging Conventions is, for example, used by other files formats including XPS and Design Web Format. The ISO/IEC 29500:2008 version is also known ECMA-376 2nd edition (2008)

Part 1. Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference (5560 pages)

Contains conformance definitions

Contains the reference material for WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, DrawingML, Shared MLs and Custom XML Schema, defining every element and attribute including the element hierarchy (parent/child relationships)

XML schemas for the markup languages are declared as XSD and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG

Defines the custom XML data storing facility

Schemas are included in the text

Part 2. Open Packaging Conventions (129 pages)

Defines the Open Packaging Conventions (package model, physical package)

Defines core properties, thumbnails and digital signatures

XML schemas for the OPC are declared as XML Schema Definitions (XSD) and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2)

Part 3. Markup Compatibility and Extensibility (40 pages)

Describes extension facilities of OpenXML documents and specifies elements and attributes by which applications with different extensions can interoperate

Extensibility rules are expressed using NVDL (ISO/IEC 19757-4)

Part 4. Transitional Migration Features (1464 pages)

Contains reference material of legacy and transitional interest

Contains controversial material such as compatibility settings and the graphics markup language VML

Contains list of differences between ECMA-376 1st edition and ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (ECMA-376 2nd edition)

The standard specifies two levels of document and application conformance, strict and transitional for each of WordprocessingML, PresentationML and SpreadsheetML. The standard also specifies applications descriptions of base and full.

ECMA-376 1st edition (2006)

The ECMA standard is structured in five parts to meet the needs of different audiences.

Part 1. Fundamentals

Vocabulary, notational conventions and abbreviations

Summary of primary and supporting markup languages

Conformance conditions and interoperability guidelines

Constraints within the Open Packaging Conventions that apply to each document type

Part 2. Open Packaging Conventions

Defines the Open Packaging Conventions (package model, physical package)

Defines core properties, thumbnails and digital signatures

XML schemas for the OPC are declared as XML Schema Definitions (XSD) and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2)

Part 3. Primer

Informative (non-normative) introduction to WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, DrawingML, VML and Shared MLs, providing context and illustrating elements through examples and diagrams

Describes the custom XML data storing facility within a package to support integration with business data

Part 4. Markup Language Reference

Contains the reference material for WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, DrawingML, Shared MLs and Custom XML Schema, defining every element and attribute including the element hierarchy (parent/child relationships)

XML schemas for the markup languages are declared as XSD and (non-normatively) using RELAX NG

Defines the custom XML data storing facility

Part 5. Markup Compatibility and Extensibility

Describes extension facilities of OpenXML documents and specifies elements and attributes by which applications with different extensions can interoperate

Extensibility rules are expressed using NVDL (ISO/IEC 19757-4)

Support and criticism

Support

Several governments, companies, organizations and software products support the Office Open XML document format:

• Software companies including Adobe Systems, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Google have products with support for OOXML.
• The British Library and the United States Library of Congress have participated in the work of Ecma TC45 and support the Office Open XML standard.
• Former Gnome Foundation board member Miguel de Icaza, who started the GNOME and Mono projects, showed support for the Office Open XML document format, stating “OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.”
• According to Ars Technica, Office Open XML gained a number of supporters including some who are directly affiliated with the OpenDocument format.
• Patrick Durusau, the editor of the OpenDocument standard, has been an advocate of the standardization of Office Open XML.
• The Microsoft Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) target Office Open XML (in its Ecma 376 1st edition variant) as their default file format.
• The non-profit organization RosettaNet Malaysia announced the release of a business-to-business standard called RosettaNet Automated Enablement standard (RAE) using the Office Open XML document standard.

Criticism of ECMA-376 1st edition

The ODF Alliance UK Action Group has stated that with OpenDocument an ISO standard for Office files already exists. Further, they argue that the Office Open XML file-format is heavily based on Microsoft's own Office applications and is thus not vendor-neutral, and that it has inconsistencies with existing ISO standards such as time and date formats and color codes.

In August 2007, the Linux Foundation published a blog post calling upon ISO National Bodies to vote “No, with comments” on OOXML. It said, ”OOXML is a direct port of a single vendor’s binary document formats. It avoids the re-use of relevant existing international standards (e.g. several cryptographic algorithms, VML, etc.). It lists a large number of “Compatibility Settings” for legacy applications (e.g. footnoteLayoutLikeWW8, autoSpaceLikeWord95, useWord97LineBreakRules, etc.) which would be difficult for other developers to implement and hardly what you would find in an aspirational, consolidated best practices document. There are literally hundreds of technical flaws that should be addressed before standardizing OOXML including continued use of binary code tied to platform specific features, propagating bugs in MS-Office into the standard, proprietary units, references to proprietary/confidential tags, unclear IP and patent rights, and much more.”

Specific criticisms made against the standard include:

• ECMA-376 1st edition does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and Times." It requires that implementations replicate a Lotus 1-2-3 bug that dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn't. Products complying with ECMA-376 would be required to use the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between certain dates. ECMA-376 2nd edition (ISO/IEC 29500) does use 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and Times".
• ECMA-376 1st edition "Embedded Object Alternate Image Requests Types" and "Clipboard Format Types" in the standard refer back to Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles – each of which are proprietary formats that have hard-coded dependencies on the Windows itself. It should instead have referenced the platform neutral standard ISO/IEC 8632 "Computer Graphics Metafile".
• Office Open XML (ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Part 4 - Transitional Migration Features) contains specific compatibility settings used when converting existing office documents to Office Open XML, most notably: autoSpaceLikeWord95, footnoteLayoutLikeWW8, lineWrapLikeWord6, mwSmallCaps, shapeLayoutLikeWW8, suppressTopSpacingWP, truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6, uiCompat97To2003, useWord2002TableStyleRules, useWord97LineBreakRules, wpJustification and wpSpaceWidth. The compatibility settings are fully documented in the ISO/IEC 29500 / Ecma 2nd edition specifications".
• Office Open XML uses unique tag for each compatibility setting. Currently, the only application’s compatibility settings are the applications that the standard’s authors have decided to include. For other application’s compatibility settings to be added, further tag names would need to be defined in the specification, potentially creating thousands of them, each having nothing to do with interoperability.
• Use of DrawingML and the transitional-use-only VML instead of W3C recommendation SVG. VML did not become a W3C recommendation.
• Use of Office MathML instead of W3C recommendation MathML. MathML is a W3C recommendation for the "inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages" and "machine to machine communication" that has been around since about 1999. However, most mathematicians continue to use the much older TeX format as their main method for typesetting complex mathematical formulae. TeX is not an ISO standard, but is fully documented and is the de facto standard for typesetting mathematical expressions.
• Office Open XML does not define a macro language, leaving this aspect to be application-defined.^{[citation needed]}
• The standard is long, with the version submitted to ISO comprising 6,546 pages. The need and appropriateness of such length has been questioned. Google remarks that the OpenDocument specification is 867 pages long and achieves the same goals. If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages). Considering that OOXML had had a significantly shorter review period than comparable standards, Google sees "reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information [as] hardly surprising."

Adoption

Several countries have formally announced either adoption, or the evaluation of adoption of OOXML.

Belgium

Belgium's Federal Public Service for Information and Communication Technology in 2006 was evaluating the adoption of the Office Open XML format. It already then confirmed that it would consider all ISO standards to be open standards, specifically mentioning Office Open XML as such a possible future ISO standard.

Denmark

In June 2007, the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation recommended that beginning with January 1, 2008 public authorities must support at least one of the two word processing document formats Office Open XML and ODF in all new IT solutions, where appropriate.

Germany

In Germany the Office Open XML standard is currently under observation by the governmental office for standards in public IT („Koordinierungs- und Beratungsstelle der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik in der Bundesverwaltung“ (KBSt). The latest release of „SAGA“ (Standards and Architectures for E-Government-Applications) includes Office Open XML file formats. The standard may be used to exchange complex documents when further processing is required.

Japan

On June 29, 2007, the government of Japan published a new interoperability framework which gives preference to the procurement of products that follow open standards. On July 2 the government declared that they hold the view that formats like Office Open XML which organizations such as Ecma International and ISO had also approved was, according to them, an open standard ^{[citation needed]}. Also, they said that it was one of the preferences, whether the format is open, to choose which software the government shall deploy.

Lithuania

Lithuanian Standards Board has adopted the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open XML format standard as Lithuanian National standard. The decision was made by Technical Committee 4 Information Technology on March 5, 2009. The proposal to adopt the Office Open XML format standard was submitted by Lithuanian Archives Department under the Government of the Republic of Lithuania.

Norway

Norway's Ministry of Government Administration and Reform is evaluating the adoption of the Office Open XML format. The ministry put the document standard under observation in December 2007.

Sweden

Kingdom of Sweden has adopted Office Open XML as a 4 part Swedish National Standard SS-ISO/IEC 29500:2009.

Switzerland

In July 2007, the Swiss Federal Council announced adherence SAGA.ch e-Government standards mandatory for its departments as well as for cantons, cities and municipalities. The latest version of SAGA.ch includes Office Open XML file formats.

United States of America

On April 15, 2009, the ANSI-accredited INCITS organisation voted to adopt ISO/IEC 29500:2008 as an American National Standard.

The state of Massachusetts has been examining its options for implementing XML-based document processing. In early 2005, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration and Finance in Massachusetts, was the first government official in the United States to publicly connect open formats to a public policy purpose: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access." Since 2007 Massachusetts classifies Office Open XML as "Open Format" and has amended its approved technical standards list — the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) — to include Office Open XML. Massachusetts now formally endorses Office Open XML formats for its public records.

Application support

Main article: Office Open XML software

The Office Open XML format is used in free software and in proprietary software. This includes office suites (both traditional and web-based) and individual applications such as word-processors, spreadsheets, presentation, and data management applications.

The latest version of Office Open XML is formally known as either ISO/IEC 29500:2008 or as ECMA-376 2nd edition (December 2008). IS 29500 is subject to an active maintenance program through the committee ISO/IEC SC34 WG4, which is working on a revision for minor edits (a Corrigendum) and a revision for substantive technical issues (an Amendment)

Microsoft, whose products currently only support the version of Office Open XML originally submitted as an ECMA standard, has committed to using the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in their products and has also committed to participate in the maintenance of this standard.

Microsoft has stated that Microsoft Office 2010 will be the first version of Microsoft Office to support ISO/IEC 29500, though no release date has been announced.

On July 28, 2008 Murray Sargent, a software development engineer in the Microsoft Office team confirmed that Word 2007 will have a service pack release that enables it to read and write ISO standard Office Open XML files. However, the 2009 Service Pack 2 release did not expose any IS 29500 features in its user interface.

In a ZDNet article Alex Brown, leader of the ISO/IEC group in charge of deciding maintenance processes for any ISO/IEC 29500 Standard, stated

"I am hoping that Microsoft Office will shortly be brought into line with the [ISO/IEC] 29500 specification, and will stay that way".

On March 13, 2008 Doug Mahugh, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft specializing in Office client interoperability and the Open XML file formats confirmed that version 1.0 of the Open XML Format SDK

"will definitely be 100% compliant with the final ISO/IEC 29500 spec, including the changes accepted at the BRM".

In a ComputerWorld interview from 2008, Doug Mahugh said that

"Microsoft would continue to update the SDK to make sure that applications built with it remained compliant with an Open XML standard as changes were made in the future".

Microsoft Open XML Format SDK contains a set of managed code libraries to create and manipulate Office Open XML files programmatically. Version 1.0 was released on June 10, 2008 and incorporates the changes made to the Office Open XML specification made during the current ISO/IEC standardization process. Version 2 of the Open XML SDK supports validating Office Open XML documents against the Office Open XML schema, as well as searching in Office Open XML documents.

PowerTools for Open XML, a set of free open source cmdlets for Windows PowerShell to create and manipulate Office Open XML files at the command line or using shell scripts.

See also

• List of document markup languages
• Comparison of document markup languages
• Comparison of Office Open XML and OpenDocument
• List of computer standards

External links

• ECMA-376 site
• ISO/IEC 29500:2008
• OpenXMLDeveloper.org, Microsoft's site for developers
• Open XML Community site Microsoft's site for customers and partners
• "The WordprocessingML Vocabulary", sample chapter from O'Reilly book Office 2003 XMLPDF (1.22 MB)
• OpenOffice.org, How do I open Microsoft Office 2007 files? Article by OpenOffice.org
• Information technology -- Office Open XML file formats, ISO Standards, JTC 1 Information technology, SC 34
• FAQs on ISO/IEC 29500, ISO's FAQ site on ISO/IEC 29500
• DOCX reference document, contains a file with fairly complex formatting and can be used to quickly check compatibility of an implementation
• OpenXML site, contains resources, articles and tools for Office Open XML
• Interoperability study showing an indication of the percentage of support for Office Open XML by several different office suite implementations in aug-2008