Good News on File Formats

Brian Jones posted two great news today on his blog.

Microsoft has agreed to:

• Publish their file format specification for the .doc, .xls and .ppt and do this under their Open Specification Promise.
• To simplify the understanding of the mapping between the old binary formats and the new ones, they will start an open source project to generate OOXML files from the old binary file formats.

These specs and projects are scheduled for February 15th.

The full details are on Brian's Blog. These are great news for all third party implementations that need to interop with those documents.

Some cheering is in order.