Office 2010: the first Office Suite to be compatible with the OpenXML Format. And the problem…
Office 2007 really captured all our imagination and Steven Sinofsky really proved to be a great project director bringing out such a wonderful product to life. So, here he is again bringing out the next iteration the Office 2010. The ribbon interface is extended to all the products in the suite including Outlook in which it was most needed. The Office Button introduced in 2007 is now gone, featuring a more stylish, yet conservative tabbed appearance with a distinct colour representing each respective Office application, the File menu in 2010 is significantly enhanced. Featuring an information centre, the Office 2010 File menu is more detailed about your Office files. Immediately users can glance at topics such as Permissions, distribution methods, versioning, property information and improved life cycle management facilities. In addition to these, users can find common functions such as Save, Save As, Open, Close, recently accessed files which unfortunately were not preserved from my Office 2007 install. The New menu is greatly enhanced; a gallery of templates can be accessed much faster instead of the cumbersome Office 2007 New Template window which got in the way.
It has been aanounced that an online ad-supported version of Office 2010 is also going to be made available for free. This enhances productivity as most of us would like to access office from wherever we are – whether in Office or outside or while travelling. Most business executives would need to make presentations at a short time’s notice. The online version will prove to be a boon to such people as they can fire up their browser and access the entire Office 2010 suite online.
Though the OpenXML format introduced by Microsoft was available in Office 2007, it wasn’t ratified until much later after its release. So, what happened was that the standards organization ratifying asked Microsoft to make some necessary changes to the format to make it a standard. These modifications were obviously not supported by Microsoft’s own product – Office 2007 because it was already out in the market. Office 2010, now, is the first product with all those compatibility modifications and it supports the OpenXML format completely from the ground up.
Now, the problem is that if you have make a document or a presentation or a spreadsheet with office 2010, then the text stays intact but the formatting gets all messed up if it is opened by Office 2007. As you may be aware, the OpenXML format stores the text (or content) as a separate file from the formatting. So, you will still be able to recover the content but not the formatting. This problem is not apparent if the formatting is just basic. The problem begins when there’s extensive formatting involved spanning multiple pages. So, I hope Microsoft bring out an update or a plugin to office 2007 to be able to be fully compatible with its own OpenXML format.
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