Friendship

The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
New File Formats for “Office 12”

White Paper

Published: June 2005

For the latest information, please see http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview


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Contents
Introduction 1
From .doc to .docx: a brief history of the Office file formats 1

Benefits of the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats 2
Integration with Business Data 2Openness and Transparency 4
Robustness 7

Description of the Microsoft Office Open XML Format 9
Document Parts 9
Microsoft Office Open XML Format specifications 9
Compatibility with new file formats 9

For more information 10
Microsoft Office Open XML Format: Preview for Developers 10
“Office 12” on Microsoft.com 10
Brian Jones’ blog 10



Introduction

With the nextversion of the Microsoft® Office System, Microsoft will introduce new, XML-based file formats for Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel®, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint®. With these new formats, Microsoft ensures that organizations can successfully and completely integrate the Microsoft Office System into their enterprise architectures. This change represents a large step forward in extendingMicrosoft’s commitment to XML, industry-standard integration technologies, and to open, published file format specifications.

The published specifications for the new Office file formats will be available with a royalty-free license, enabling anyone to freely access the full documentation and quickly learn how to integrate Office files into their solutions. The use of XML offers the benefitsof greater transparency and openness than were possible with the previous binary file formats. The new formats allow Office documents to easily integrate with existing and future line-of-business systems, as the contents are now open and accessible. The new formats are also designed with long-term robustness and accessibility in mind, so that file corruptions will be easily repairable, and there isno reliance on any particular software application to provide access to the document contents. “Office 12” files will also be much more efficient, taking up far less space than the previous formats and allowing for quicker transmission times and a smaller impact on storage.

The new file formats represent a major step forward, and will be made available not only to customers who adopt “Office12,” but also to customers using previous versions of the Microsoft Office System. Free tools will enable users of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 to open and save to the new formats, so that everyone can benefit from this innovation.


From .doc to .docx: a brief history of the Office file formats

The binary file formats in use currently were designed in 1994—before the advent of XMLand before widespread exchange of documents and data that is common today. These file formats, .doc, .xls, and .ppt, were introduced with the release of Microsoft Office 97, at a time when it was important to optimize the files for storage on slow hard drives and “floppy” disks; it was not as crucial to focus on easy access to data within the files for better content reuse, document generation,and seamless integration of the documents into business processes. Rich collaboration with multiple authors was less common, and the files were primarily suited to single document authoring scenarios.

Subsequent releases of the Office suite built upon the document creation functionality and the growing popularity of the Internet and Internet-enabled technologies to support collaborativeauthoring and broader sharing of information. In particular, support for XML paved the way for sophisticated document management and data exchange scenarios. Office 2000 introduced an HTML file format with document properties defined in XML; Office XP included the first XML reference schema (SpreadsheetML); and Office 2003 introduced a standard way to store and exchange data stored in documents by using...