Microsoft opens Office document format

Microsoft has made the Office 2003 document format public. I’m not quite sure I’d call it an “open standard”, but it’s pretty damned close. And it’s fantastic news. Keeping the format closed was stupid — customers have long wanted more control of their own documents and third party developers always seem to be able to (clumsily) reverse engineer the doc format anyhow. Kudos to Microsoft for listening to us, their paying customers. Of course this should be great news for projects like OpenOffice.org, but I’m actually far more interested in being able to programatically interact with Office docs than have a good .doc importer in OO.org. __In the language I choose__. This may not be the type of stuff the average home user is going to do, but I can gaurantee you mid to large sized businesses will be able to do some really cool stuff with nailed down Office XML schemas.

What do I want? I want to be able to define a bunch of standard Word templates that everyone in the organisation uses. I can build an XML translation to produce valid XHTML styles that I’ll load into my Content Mangement System - Plone in this case. Then our users can write their docs in Word where they’re comfortable, and simply save to their Plone DAV home folder. Plone will index the document, and display it __perfectly__ within the browser window. I’ve been screwing around with this workflow with OpenOffice docs, but being able to do it with native Word docs will be just AWESOME. And I know I’ll be able to do this sort of stuff no matter what CMS we may use in the future. Powerful, powerful stuff.