Denmark has announced that it will stop using some Microsoft document formats and move to the open document format (ODF) in April next year.

The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.

The introduction of Office 2007 brought a wave of document compatibility issues for users of Office 2004, but Microsoft has at last delivered a non-beta version of its Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. And while ODF support has been promised for Office 2007 SP2, there's no sign of it for Office 2008.

So, Corel has launched its latest version of WordPerfect Office. What have they done to make it better than Office 2007, better than the free Open Office, and better than web apps like Google Docs? Turns out there’s some key new features which are very attractive - but are they enough to make you switch – or even take notice?

Microsoft is planning on releasing SP2 in 2009, with support to save documents in ODF format as standard, in the name of ‘interoperability’, while adding PDF and XPS save/export compatibility without requiring any add-on software. The EU’s Commission has ‘taken note’ and welcomed the decision, while promising to investigate it further. What does this mean?

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?

The late Charles M. Schulz, the genius behind Peanuts, could make a much more telling comment on human foibles through one of his cartoon strips than many a writer can in 1000 words.

The Microsoft Office Open XML document format has been accepted as a standard by the International Standards Organisation with minimal approval.

In a few days the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML will be known - whether it will be accepted as a second ISO standard for documents. Two years ago, the Open Document Format was ratified as a standard.

Microsoft has announced that it will - with a European partner - contribute to an open-source project for reading and writing Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio files.