A few updates on the OpenXML formats

Sorry I've been offline for the past couple weeks. I've been meaning to post some content for awhile but I've been swamped with Office 14 planning. I was trying to stay up on the comments from my last post, but still ended up slacking there as well (I'm sorry I didn't reply to everyone's comments). I've also been receiving a bunch of e-mail lately from folks, and I wanted to apologize for not replying yet. Hopefully I'll get some free time soon.

I just realized that I never finished my "Intro to SpreadsheetML" posts, so I'll try to get something up early next week to close that off. I also haven't posted many examples of PresentationML so hopefully I'll be able to get to that as well. Let me know if anyone has some examples they'd like to see in order to help them get started with Open XML development.

National Bodies comments on DIS 29500 online

If you're looking for some good weekend reading though, you should check out the official comments submitted by the various National Bodies during the DIS 29500 contradictory review: https://jtc1sc32.org/doc/recent/JTC001-N-8530.zip (if you're looking for some fun conspiracies, check out the metadata of J1N850-12 and J1N850-13 and see who the authors were).

J1N850-22 is the official Ecma response to the comments, which was posted a few weeks ago. This is the first time the official comments from the various national bodies have been posted. You can see that there are a number of shared themes in the documents, which was why the Ecma response tried to group many of the comments rather than replying to each one individually.

James Governor takes a closer look at archival formats

OpenXML vs ODF: does the archiving argument stack up?

"The industry needs to move beyond good vs evil, manichaen black vs white, beyond the single answer to a problem. Our monoetheism does us no favours ... One true format? What do we need that for and what god are we worshipping? What are the problems we're trying to solve?"

I think as we see more and more applications pop up that support OpenXML (besides those built by Microsoft), you'll start to see the anti-OpenXML folks calm down a bit. The ideal in any archival format is that it allows for long term access with as little disturbance as possible. That was the whole point of OpenXML. Give the world a fully documented format and pass the ownership of that format over to a standards body for safe keeping and future development. OpenXML allows anyone to build tools that read and write the formats, and at the same time is designed to cause the least amount of disruption possible. You can move all your existing documents into OpenXML, and you won't lose a thing. J

Open XML workshop in Sweden

https://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv/archive/2007/04/19/Office-Open-XML-Workshop-in-Sweden.aspx

There have been a number of workshops going on around the world to help educate developers on how to build solutions leveraging the OpenXML formats and I'm pretty excited to see the types of solutions they build.

You can follow Doug's blog if you'd like to find out more about the workshops: https://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/default.aspx

Have a great weekend.

-Brian