Channel 9 has just broken the news that Microsoft Office will change its file formats to XML. Very interesting indeed. I wonder how compatible this will be to something like OpenOffice.org’s XML format?

So, what was announced?

Word, Excel, and Powerpoint will get a new file format all based on XML.

The extensions will change from .DOC, .XLS, .PPT to .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX.

The new file format is actually enclosed in a ZIP file. Change the extension name to .ZIP and you’ll be able to double-click and get access to all the pieces of the new format (Brian in his demo shows what it looks like).

The new file format will be usable on existing versions of Office.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 2:34 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.