Micro$oft has finally published their Office binary formats. Perhaps many of us, Free Software users see this as a big win. Though OpenOffice supports reading and writing in MS Office formats, these specs from horse’ mouth would surely be expected to make things better. Not so. It seems like these formats are not designed to inter-operate. This post from Joel Spolsky throws the light on why it is so.
I think as Free Software enthusiasts, we should still boycott these formats (or use a subset of these and ensure that they work fine with Free Software) and instead use the ODF instead. A lot of documents have started appearing in the new OOXML (with docx extension). Afew half-baked solutions exist to read these documents as of this writing. But hopefully a fully OO.o integrated solution will appear so that we can read docx files and convert them into saner formats.
Here is another related analysis from FSFE on why Microsoft is publishing these formats at this point of time.