“Microsoft’s Office 2007 for Windows saves documents in a format that’s incompatible the company’s Mac Office application,” Macworld reports.
Macworld reports, “By default, Office 2007 saves documents in what the company calls ‘Microsoft Office Open XML.’ The new format applies across Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications on PCs using Office 2007. The formats are specifically termed: docx, xlsx and pptx.”
Microsoft’s “Mac Business Unit hasn’t yet delivered similar software for existing Mac installations of Office. It has promised to ship them, but hasn’t yet committed to a specific date for this.,” Macworld reports.
Full article here.
APC reports, “A spokesperson for the MBU reminded APC of its promise at WWDC that ‘free downloadable converters would be available’ following the release of Office 2007 for Windows, but was unable to tell us when. ‘Unfortunately it is still to early for us to say when the converters will be available,’ she said.”
“Of course, Office 2007 applications can save their documents in ‘backward compatible’ formats, but that be a pain for co-workers and Mac users alike,” APC reports.
“Perhaps the only good news to come out of the announcement is the reluctance of businesses to upgrade. According to some sources, businesses will wait up to two years to make the switch,” APC reports. “Perhaps Mac users will have the converters they need by then.”
Full article here.
To coolfactor, reality Check, and the others who see this as a nonissue:
There are two factors to consider.
1. MS XML spec (which is well over 1000 pages of text) contains binary wrappers for formats/objects that are MS proprietary – this makes it less than open. Also the licensing of MS formats is unclear. It’s definitely not an ‘open’ format, as in open source, or even ODF. It has had little scrutiny outside of MS and has taken *no* input. It’s not for the users, it’s to maintain MS hegemony with an *appearance* of openess.
2. The real “vendor lock-in” on the new MS Office comes from the new DRM feature that businesses will use to ‘protect’ internal documents. Not only is there no converter to old format for this feature, but they also have to purchase an extra MS server to handle the access rights for users.
It’s really insidious posturing (as usual) from Microsoft.