Uh-oh... Microsoft Office 2007 not OK with OOXML

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 April 2008 14:54

Opinion and Analysis

A test of Office 2007’s compatibility in outputting OOXML compliant documents has shown that Microsoft’s latest Office suite generates files with errors, failing the test. But is this really a surprise?

Alex Brown, writing at the Griffin Brown blog, has done a test of Office 2007’s compatibility with Microsoft’s own OOXML format and found problems.

OOXML is Microsoft’s own XML standard, which was rushed through the ISO standardisations process, and which passed as a standard, reportedly by a slim margin, leading to two competing XML document formats: ODF, used in Open Office, an open source Microsoft Office clone, and OOXML, Microsoft’s ‘new’ XML standard.

Brown said that he was “excited to receive from Murata Makoto a set of the RELAX NG schemas for the (post-BRM) revision of OOXML, and thought it would be interesting to validate some real-world content against them, to get a rough idea of how non-conformant the standardisation of 29500 had made MS Office 2007.”

Brown’s blog post goes into much more detail on the testing, but in short, there are two “conformance” models – ‘strict’ and ‘transitional’.

Testing against the ‘strict’ model, 122,000 ‘invalidity messages’ were generated, while testing against the ‘transitional’ model saw only 84 errors of the same type occur: “<m:degHide m:val="on"/>”.

Brown suggests that Microsoft can rectify this situation with a service pack or other Office 2007 update, and wonders how compliant the ODF standard would be if similarly tested, saying that he wants to “repeat the exercise with ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF 1.0) and a popular implementation of OpenDocument”, and he asks if “anybody [will] be brave enough to predict what kind of result that exercise will have?”

Please read onto page 2 to see a response to Brown’s testing.