The Nice Thing About Standards...

We used to say, "One of the nice things about standards is that you can have so many of them." This was brought home to me today in a strange way.

A colleague sent me a file containing text and images whose file extension was .docx. Turns out this signals a document stored in Microsoft Word's XML format. It was created under Vista on a Windows system. I'm trying to open it on a Mac with Word:X. No joy. Word doesn't even see it as a legitimate Word document and won't open it at all.

So on a lark, I tried NeoOffice, the OS X port of OpenOffice. Voila! It opens, though the formatting is a bit off here and there. The document is definitely readable and mostly properly formatted.

I figure if NeoOffice opens it, OO on Windows ought to do the right thing. Wrong. OpenOffice, even after upgrading to the latest 2.2.x release, doesn't see it as a document form it recognizes. It offers Word 2003 XML as an option, so I try that. No joy.

So let me get this straight. Microsoft wants us to adopt its XML "standard" as a compatible file format rather than using the Open Document Format (ODF) which is beating the pants off Microsoft XML all over the globe. But the format's not even backward compatible with its own product on OS X. NeoOffice is supposed to be a port of OO, which means it should lag the latter in features.

Moral: resist Microsoft's blatant attempt to establish a new proprietary standard. Insist on Open Document Format.