Latest changes to the Ecma spec

  • Article

Those of you who using Beta 2 probably noticed that the .docx versions of the Ecma working draft 1.4 didn't open.

As I'm sure you've noticed from the latest draft of the spec, we've been working pretty hard over the past several months in the Ecma Technical committee flushing out the specification. It's actually undergone significant changes from the 1.3 draft, which Office Beta 2 was compatible with. Since then we've been significantly updating the documentation and making changes to the actual format where it was clear there would be interoperability issues, or general problems with accessibility and ease of use. Those changes are the reason that Beta 2 is unable to open the latest version of the formats.

Obviously we will make sure that the RTM version of Office 2007 supports the final version of the Ecma standard, and in addition to that we just announced that tomorrow we will have a technical refresh for Beta 2 which (among other things) updates the file format support to be compatible with the 1.4 working draft of the Ecma Office Open XML standard. So, once you download the Beta 2 technical refresh, you'll be able to open and view those .docx files. You can get the .docx files here:

Or if you don't have Beta 2 technical refresh, you can get the pdf versions here:

And of course I mentioned yesterday that the schemas are now available to download as well: https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/09/12/750856.aspx

-Brian