Microsoft ignoring the very standard that they stuff the panel for to get it approved so that competitors still have to do the work to meet it while they do whatever they like!?

It's almost as if ISO standards aren't worth the very expensive process of meeting them or something.

What it seems to be referring to is that the initial standard produced by that stuffed panel was supposed to be transitional and replaced by a strict version but MS ept using the transitional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML doesn't actually use the word deprecated in its account of the shenanigans.

However as far as the ODF is concerned the true open standard isn't ISO/IEC 29500 \t all, it's ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

That's not true. It's more complicated than it should be but there are reasons. There are only minor differences in detail between the "transitional" version of OOXML used by MS Office since 2010 and the strict version which was ratified. However, they both use completely different XML namespaces, which makes switching between them or migrating unnecessarily complex. MS Office can happily save things using the strict specification but few applications can actually read it.

Will MS seek to protect its fiefdom by making changes to its file formats and thus breaking LibreOffice?

Once upon a time, this was SOP for MS.

It will interesting to see if the MS of 2022 (and beyond) actually does care about ISO standards.

Genuine question - how important is total document compatibility?

Customers don't send me word files that do more than you can do in Notepad.

The Excel files are rarely more than data dumps.

I'm not using Libre Office, but I doubt there'd be any problems if I did.

What are others experiences?

Having recently had two erroneous bug reports for my own OOXML library submitted by people using LibreOffice I'm sorry to say that they're more common than you'd expect.

In my past experience there are issues, but largely due to corporate supplied (and mandated) masters.

It isn't for us anyway as we have, for example, add-ons supplied by the Finance system provider that run solely through Excel and our general requirements are probably too complex.

Powerpoint and Impress slide decks are still not entirely compatible Designing on one and presenting on the other (either way) often breaks layouts, particularly if animation is used.

As a freelance editor (sometimes of documents with complex layouts), I find that the small differences in layout that result from opening a document in a different installation of the same version of Word can be enough of a pain in the arse to deal with, never mind when working with .docx in LO. For example, I've learnt that I can't use my invoice template on my laptop otherwise it screws it up – same version, same licence.

I know that this is MS's fault, and believe me I'd much rather be using LO if I could, but as it stands, I need the highest level of compatibility possible. To be honest, I'd like it to be even higher than it currently is. If I've worked on a layout-critical document (and please don't ask me why someone who really cares about layout would be using Word and not something more stable...), then I'll send them a PDF version in addition to the .docx just to say "this is what it looks like at my end". The fact that I have to do this pisses me off immensely.

Usually if someone sends me a .DOC Word file or a .XLS Excel file...I simply immediately delete it.

I'm not collaborating in editing your file, I'm supposed to be reading it (only). And 'raw' document files should *never* be communicated to others if your intention is for them only to read them - that's what PDF was created for. I am not risking [my] network's security over your inability to understand this concept.

Of course, if you are collaborating in the creation of the data, then that's a much different story.

You do know that PDFs are no more secure against malware than DOC, DOCX, XLS or XLSX files?

https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-techniques-behind-attacks/

Of course it's fun if it's a contract... so ya just tweak a coupla numbers, eh... and see if anyone notices.

Have they fixed the problem with substring functions yet, where characters number from 0 on one OS, but from 1 on the other?

ISO/IEC 29500, also known as OOXML, was approved in 2008 in two variants: Transitional, as a bridge from the former proprietary document formats, and Strict, the true open standard. Transitional was supposed to be deprecated in 2010, when all versions of Microsoft Office would support Strict. The reality is that Transitional - which is not an ISO/IEC standard - is still the default document format for all flavours of Microsoft Office in 2022, and won't probably be deprecated in the future.

In the meantime, the implementation of the standard (which one?) has been reviewed 49 times (23 major revisions, 10 minor revisions, 16 no revisions, last major just a few daus ago, all details are in this page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-oi29500/1fd4a662-8623-49c0-82f0-18fa91b413b8), while the standard has been reviewed only 4 times: in 2008 (https://www.iso.org/standard/51463.html), 2011 (https://www.iso.org/standard/59575.html), 2012 (https://www.iso.org/standard/61750.html) and 2016 (https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html).

I am not a developer, but there is a major discrepancy between the 49 revisions listed by Microsoft on his website, and the 4 revisions of the standard, which not only is not loyal to the original promise of being moved from Transitional to Strict, but is also different from the current description.

Having encountered numerous errors in LibreOffice's handling (both reading and writing) of OOXML, including ones that OpenOffice doesn't have, I have to disagree with the statement. It's really just a blame game. OpenDoc may indeed be a better format but that is almost last century's war. Blaming Microsoft for bugs in your own software is just embarrassing.

For anyone looking for a free application that handles OOXML files pretty well I'd point to OnlyOffice or the SoftMaker suite.

Even though I haven't used LibreOffice in many years, and I consider MS Office to be objectively better, it's still nice knowing that there's always that alternative out there should I need it.