Office 2007 Fails The OOXML Test

Microsoft emerged the victor last month when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) confirmed that the company's Office Open XML (OOXML) specification had garnered enough votes to qualify for standards certification.
However, one ironic drawback remains following Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) efforts to win the votes of ISO representatives: It's now incompatible with Microsoft Office.
According to ISO official Alex Brown, the company's Office 2007 does not correctly support OOXML, even though the formats in OOXML started out as the default file formats for Office 2007. The reason for this appears to be the myriad changes made to the spec to satisfy ISO representatives, encouraging them to change their votes to support the format.
Brown said he determined Office's incompatibility through his own tests.
"[I] thought it would be interesting to validate some real-world content against them, to get a rough idea of how non-conformant the standardization of 29500 [the standards number assigned to OOXML by the ISO] had made MS Office 2007," Brown said in a posting on his blog late last week. He used the 6,000-page specification itself as his test data.
The results? Tests run using a "strict conformance model" yielded some 122,000 errors, Brown noted. A less strict "transitional model" did much better, yielding only 84 errors.
According to Brown, concerns among some of the participating national bodies involved in the standards setting process lead to the transitional version of the specification, which is purposely much more compatible with the original OOXML spec.
"Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file format rug-pulling stunt in future," he added.