Surely this is completely unsuitable for any kind of archiving - in order to archive things for posterity it is necessary to force conversion of documents into a fully documented format, and any undocumented content should be manually checked to see if it is converted correctly rather than allowing the unspecified content to get into the archive.

To do this I would suggest the best way to go is to save all legacy Microsoft in PDF format which is fully documented, and any create and store new documents in ODF or PDF depending on whether they need to be edited or not.

It’s perfectly well understood - by me at least - that Visual Basic in some form or another, rules the roost in MS Office. But if you consider these file formats as part and parcel of a web-inclusive SOA - ie, you have software components that include web servers and web browsers in the stack - you also have to consider J[ava]script, Perl, php, et alii.

Merely including Visual Basic as a macro language, no longer cuts the mustard. And that is where Microsoft’s ECMA 376 again, comes a cropper. I haven’t seen any evidence on any Microsoft blogger’s site that they’re aware of this - mind you, I haven’t seen any evidence on any FOSS blogger’s site that they’re aware of a wider macro language issue either. It’s just I think for the FOSS people, it’s a case of getting a kick in the pants and nobody’ll be able to stop them. Microsoft’ll need to stifle the Steelypips first.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft will give up its dreams of empire and instead work with the rest of the world on a unified format. Users have enough to worry about trying to choose between BlueRay and HD-DVD, trying to avoid picking a loser like so many did with VHS vs. Beta. They don’t need to get stuck trying to pick a file format.

I apologize for insulting you and one of your commentors.

It certainly is true that a more constructive approach to the discussion by me would be more useful to everybody.

With regards,
-Sam

And so, tied as it is to MS Office 2k7, as opposed to ODF’s plethora of re-implementations, I think ECMA 376 would fail as an archiving file format because of its single source nature. (Please note: ECMA 376 will no doubt have a wide collection of sub-implementations - Brian Jones is sure of that, and I expect he is right. MS Office has always had a vast set of independent software developed on top of it, but then, so does AutoCAD, and Oracle, etc. But that isn’t the same as a wide set of independent re-implementations a la OO.org, WASCE, KOffice, et alii.)

Thanks Wesley.

W^L+ - The throwaway line about “hopefully China too” is a very interesting one. I had not even been considering that issue in the broader analysis. make a single format even less likely, doesnt it?