A self-confessed Microsoft office enthusiast who also claims to be a big Linux fan runs a test of openoffice.org version 3 beta to read the ill-conceived ooxml file – and fails. Should we be surprised here? He claims to have created a document in word 2003 and saved it as word 2007 format (I assume that word 2003 is actually able to correctly save it as word 2007 – thus far no one from Redmond can confirm that it can be done). Anyway, he then laments oo.o version 3 beta cannot read it.

To wit:
“I’m very disappointed to have to say it, but OpenOffice.org’s support for the Office 2007 file formats simply isn’t ready for prime time. I haven’t had time yet to do a full review of the suite, but the tests I tried were extremely basic import/export operations on documents that were not in the least bit complex. Unfortunately, the beta OpenOffice.org struck out.

It’s strange, if you think about it. Wasn’t the whole point of XML file formats for Office to make the documents more compatible with other software? Isn’t XML a self-describing, human-readable file format that should make reverse-engineering a breeze (compared to the old, binary Office formats, at least)? And isn’t OOXML, the Office 2007 file format,a public ISO standard?”

Hmm. It is May 12th now and no one has a finalized copy of the alleged “public ISO standard” of ooxml. Please, someone buy the author of this article a clue.