Microsoft’s Open Office XML found better than its rival OpenDocument Format

Microsoft’s Open Office XML and its competitor OpenDocument Format have always been rivals in the field of document formats. A new study led by Burton Group finds that Open Office XML is more useful than the latter one.

	Microsoft’s Open Office XML found better than its rival OpenDocument Format
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The standards have been the subject of wide and varied debate in the software industry and each format has its advantages and drawbacks.

In support of Open Office XML:

It is the most widely used office productivity packages currently rely on various proprietary and reverse engineered binary file formats such as doc, ppt and xls. For users of the binary formats there could be an advantage to migrating to an open XML standard that maps the features of previous binary file formats. Office Open XML for this purpose explicitly states as a goal of the format to preserve investments in existing files and applications.

Microsoft key benefits arguments:

- Integration of business information with documents

- Open and royalty-free specification

- Compact, robust file format

- Safer documents

- Easier integration

- Transparency and improved information security

- Compatibility

Criticism of Open Office XML:

Criticism originates from a wide variety of organizations and individuals, including the free software and open source communities, FFII, OpenDocument supporters and major industry players that develop Office software around OpenDocument, such as Sun Microsystems, Novell, IBM, and Google.

Office Open XML has been widely criticized by these organizations on technical and legal grounds.

There is also criticism that the proposed standard overlaps with OpenDocument, which is standardised as ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

In addition, the standardization process itself has been questioned, including with regard to balloting irregularities by some technical committees, Microsoft representatives and Microsoft partners in trying to get Office Open XML approved. FFII launched a campaign against this standard.

On the other hand, there is OpenDocument format (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300, full name: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications), a file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.

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