GeekPAC

Stephen Walli writes about his adventures with the OOXML format and his attempt to import OOXML documents into Pages ‘08, Apple’s new word processing software that is part of the iWork 2008 suite. The long and short if it: multiple parties seem to conflate “OOXML conformance” with “Office 2007 support”. How do we know Office’s .docx files conform to the OOXML spec? How do we know that an OOXML reader from an ISV can be certain that it can read any Office 2007 document? The opinion of Stephen, and I happen to agree, is that it’s impossible to be certain. Going forward, OOXML will most likely mean whatever Office 2007 defines it to be, regardless of the OOXML spec and whatever standards body oversees it. One has to wonder if this is what all government procurement offices had in mind when told of the OOXML standard.