the tale of the file formats

The Tale of the Two File FormatsOnce upon a time Microsoft

created the Office SuiteEveryone loved it and

Microsoft made lots of money

Office File Looked Like This

Proprietary, closed format that can only be opened with appropriate Microsoft office format

It was a good business decisionIf someone wanted to create Office

files they had to buy a copySame for people who just wanted

to read and/or print these files

Compare to TXT files

Some people got nervousVery important people used office

to create very important documentsThey worried:

What if Microsoft goes out of business?

All of a sudden…Bunch of people got together to resolve this

problem (it was a problem!)They created an absolutely free, open document

standard called Open Document Format (ODF)

All competitive office productivity suites such as Open Office, Star Office and etc Switched to ODF

It looked like this:

Human readableVery well documented

VIPS Were ImpressedMany politicians, government officials and

even many business owners were impressedODF documents can be opened by dozens of

different apps made by different companiesThey decided to ditch Microsoft Office

Bill got scared…

So he made new office formatHe called it Office Open XML (OOXML)It looked like this inside

Sort of open…The new format is sort of openAnyone can create an app that reads or

creates .docx and .xlsxProvided they read the documentation…

VIPS Forgot about ODFMicrosoft continues to make

moneyOn the other hand users must

deal with the format confusion for few years now…

DOC and DOCX

Closed, proprietary, old

format

Open, accessible, new format

New formats have new featuresWhen you create a document in

Word 2007 and save it as Word 2003 format you may see this: