Open Office XML becomes the ISO standard

The format that the 2007 Microsoft Office office application package uses to store collected documents is sufficiently votes and considered an international standard. However, some organizations and countries consider it a "gloomy day" for the computing community.

The new decision is published on the European standard website Ecma International yesterday. ISO is expected to make an official announcement this week.

Microsoft also said on its website that Open Office XML has been approved by 86% of its member countries, far exceeding the 75% requirement, and received the approval of 75% of ISO members (target: 66.66 %), thereby officially joining the standard open document format system with HTML, PDF and ODF. The US Software Group affirmed that this is evidence that they are ready to facilitate their proprietary technology to work with other competing programs.

However, this event makes the Open Office XML rival uneasy to assume that the OOXML standard is still "closed" to many other software and can make Microsoft customers have no choice but to continue right. Buy their products forever. Meanwhile, many Internet users expect this to be just an information of . April Fool's Day.

Since a few years ago when Office 2007 was launched, Microsoft had intended to change the method of saving Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, which could make it impossible to read records in government and businesses in the new format, especially on programs not produced by this company.

Last week, Tom Robertson, responsible for managing standards and product compatibility at Microsoft, revealed them and Ecma handled most of the issues that ISO members have come up with. But there are still some opinions that OOXML has not worked well with other software such as Sun and IBM. In addition, there are concerns that Microsoft may use another version of OOXML in the Office 2007 package instead of the ISO-approved format.