Office standards war finally over

Last-ditch attempts to derail the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats have failed.

Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had complained that an international ballot that approved the standard in April was rushed an poorly conducted.

The International Standards Organisation said at the weekend that objectors had failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority to overturn the earlier ruling.

The decision will mean systems using Microsoft's OOXML will be able to compete for lucrative government contracts with those using the Open Document format (ODF), which is also an ISO standard.

It ends two years of wrangling over OOXML, which was introduced with Microsoft Office 2007. However, it is by no means clear that it will win the standards war.

A Service Pack 2 update of Office 2007 next year will provide native support for ODF, and not some parts of OOXML as amended for the standard.

Dr Alex Brown, who was a British representative on the ISO voting panel, said recently that he believed OOXML would be used primarily for compatibility with Microsoft's old binary formats and take second place to ODF for general use.