On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:47:52 -0800 (PST) Came this utterance formulated by Misty Robertson to my mailbox:
> Can I open files from microsoft 2007 using openoffice? If so, I am > unable to, what is the problem? Thanks Yes you can, but there are several issues you should be aware of. * Microsoft Office 2007 uses a version of DOCX that Microsoft wrote prior to beginning the standardisation process. This was taken up by Ecma at Microsofts request and with some few modifications became Ecma-376 (1st Edition[1]), making it a pre-release to the first edition. * The original file format as submitted to Ecma was an XML output of Microsoft Office 2007's internat binary file format, DOC. * This was introduced to the ISO/IEC standardisation process and after some considerable modification was accepted as ISO/IEC 29500[2] where it has been released as four separate standards. To make this work Ecma-376(2nd Edition[1]) was released. * Microsoft Office 2007 therefore uses a very early pre-release version of the international standard. * There is no plans to make Microsoft Office 2007 read or write in the international standard format announced to date (this is planned for Office 2010). Office 2007 DOCX format will then become an orphan format. * There is no internal version in the Ecma-376 saved document formats. Thus a program does not know which version of the standard it is trying to open, unless it meets something peculiar to a given version. * Later versions of OpenOffice.org (3.0 onward) will open Ecma-376 (1st Edition) documents with varying levels of success. * There is always some risk of data and formatting loss when swapping between formats; even though they are different versions of the same format. This issue does exists between earlier versions of Microsoft DOC formats and also Microsoft RTF formats as well. For these reasons i highly recommend Office 2007 DOCX save formats not be used at all. If you can request the original in DOC format both parties will be better off. [1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm [2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51463 -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.org
