September 8, 1997
Office 97 File Formats, Take Two
By Bob O'Donnell
Ideally, everyone learns from their mistakes, but some mistakes lead to bigger
discoveries than others. In fact, sometimes a mistake was really meant to happen.
Such is the case with last week's Plugged In
column. In it, I argued that Microsoft could solve the world's problems by simply
publishing the native file formats for its Office 97 applications. Well, OK, the world may
have greater problems, but I did say that if Microsoft released the file formats to the
public, some of the day-to-day hassles faced by ordinary users and IS staff could be
resolved..
The problem is, Microsoft has already done it. Much to my -- and many other people's
--surprise Microsoft has released all the gory, technical details of the Word 97, Excel
97, PowerPoint 97, and OfficeArt 97 file formats. You can find them on both the July
edition of the Microsoft Developer's Network (MSDN) CD and in the library section of the MSDN Web site (note that entry
requires you to complete a simple, free registration process)..
Microsoft didn't announce the release of the file formats to the world, but an Office
product manager stressed that the company wasn't trying to hide it either. After receiving
a great number of requests, Microsoft sent the file-format information to the people it
thought would be most interested -- developers -- on the developer kit CD and didn't
bother to do a press release on it. The result, however, is that very few people seem to
know about the release of the file formats, as evidenced by the reactions posted to my forum last week and confirmed in
my discussions with people who follow Microsoft very closely..
Personally, I think this is relatively big news, especially for IS managers,
consultants, and integrators dealing with an ever-changing landscape of desktop
applications and file-format incompatibilities. MS Office file compatibility is a checkbox
requirement for virtually all business applications, and the fact that any developer can
read and write Office files natively is important. (However, supporting those formats is
not a trivial task.).
It is also worth noting that this is the first time the company has released the file
formats so widely. In the past, Microsoft only released its file formats on a limited
basis to certain developers, and the company required those developers to sign
nondisclosure agreements. Now, however, a two-person garage operation can write a word
processor that works with Word 97 files as its native format..
Cynics will argue that unless Microsoft releases control over its format over to a
standards body, publication of the file formats doesn't really matter. Although I can
understand the intent of such an argument, I can't completely buy it. For one thing,
Office 97 applications are the first from Microsoft to include forward-thinking file
conversion so that the functions in, say, Word 2000 will be usable in Word 97 files. In
fact, this is part of the reasoning that Microsoft used to justify the file-format changes
between Office 95 and Office 97..
So, ultimately, we're left with the question of what is the value of universal file
formats and would the now-public Office 97 file formats be worthy contenders for such a
title? I think (or at least hope) that 10 years from now we'll look back and laugh at the
inability to read from and/or write to any kind of file from any application running under
any OS. In the interim, however, I think we'll go through some additional difficult
transitions and even more file-incompatibility problems. But I still believe that
universal adoption of the Office 97 formats would be a good step forward..
On an unrelated note, I want to point out to regular readers of this column that
Netscape announced last week that it will be bundling the NetMedic Internet-monitoring
utility with a new deluxe version of Communicator, as I had suggested many weeks back.
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Copyright 1997, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
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