Microsoft expands formats supported in Office suite

New Delhi

May 23, 2008

Microsoft Corp is expanding the range of document formats supported in its
Office productivity suite.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different
document formats within MS Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With the release
of MS Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the
list will grow to include support for XML paper specification (XPS), portable
document format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and open document format (ODF) v1.1.

Microsoft has defined a roadmap for its implementation of international
standard ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML). IS29500 was approved by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International
Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in March.

Microsoft is also committed to providing Office customers with the ability to
open, edit and save documents in the Chinese national document file format
standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF). As UOF develops and achieves market
adoption in China, Microsoft will distribute support for this format with Office
to its customers in China.

The company has announced that it will be an active participant in the future
evolution of ODF, open XML, XPS and PDF standards.

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of
ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF
maintenance. The company will also be a participant in the ongoing
standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF.

“We are committed to providing Office users with greater choice among
document formats and enhanced interoperability between those formats and the
applications that implement them,” said Chris Capossela, Senior VP, Microsoft
Business Division. “By increasing the openness of our products and
participating actively in the development and maintenance of document format
standards, we believe we can help create opportunities for developers and
competitors, including members of the open source communities, to innovate and
deliver new value for customers,” he added.

Microsoft will work with the Interoperability Executive Customer Council and
other customers to identify the areas where document format interoperability
matters most, and then collaborate with other vendors to achieve
interoperability between their implementations of the formats that customers are
using today. This work will continue to be carried out in the Interop Vendor
Alliance, the Document Interoperability Initiative, and a range of other
interoperability labs and collaborative venues.