Without a documented, open standard, the application becomes the only way to get data into or out of a file. If the application is a closed-source, commercial program, then the user is at the software company's mercy, hoping that the program will continue to work, and that the format contains no serious bugs. The economics of proprietary software reward complicated and hard-to-understand file formats, because they ensure that users will continue to use the program.
With open-source sofware, the opposite is true: Programmers have an incentive to make the file format as open and readable as possible, and to encourage others to write programs that work with the same format. Format changes are documented and debated by a community of programmers and users, ensuring that the program strikes a good balance between backward compatibility and future features.
This document incompatibility shows it’s ugly side when you can’t open files from other people using another piece of software. This is why I do not believe taking on a large task such as creating OOXML was really worth the effort. Creating a new document format in the face of another format perfected for the job at hand, reinforced the beliefs of many that Microsoft wants to control all of the standards they use. Strangely enough, if they had chosen to use ODF, it would have helped their ailing PR by showing people that they are indeed interested in making document compatibility a true focus. That decision would most certainly be more consumer-friendly than adding in the OOXML format, or a piece rather, into Office 2007, causing confusion with consumers about whether or not others can read their documents.
ODF is also much simpler. It is functionally similar to OOXML, but comprises only 850 pages of code, compared to more than 6000 pages for OOXML.
It is not hard to believe, as many in the standards community do, that Microsoft's whole strategy is to further entrench its global dominance and freeze out competitors.
Microsoft could, after all, have adopted the ODF standard itself and not pursued OOXML. Ask yourself why it would develop a rival standard, then bully others into adopting it. We will know in a couple of weeks which way the ISO vote goes.
Oha. So, it's another boolean flag and describes what the application should do during editing (hint: it's a file-format and not a guide how to implement the application itself). To be able to load+save that flag and those PII thing, I would need to know now more details what PII exactly is, where it's stored and how I am able to load it. But at none of the 7000 pages are any details about this Sad Fine, only Microsoft knows...
