Just before I left the office yesterday evening, I downloaded some presentations from Microsoft. Not surprisingly, these were in the new Office 2007 (OpenXML) document format and Windows XP recognised them as zipped archives (which they are – if you open one up, there are a load of XML files and graphics – incidentally a great way to extract graphics from a presentation – although curiously they all have the date and time stamp of 01/01/1980).

As I still use Office 2003 at work, it seemed logical to me that these files would be inaccessible, but I opened one up out of curiosity and PowerPoint gave me the option to install a compatibility pack (presumably I’d already installed an update to provide the “hook” for Office 2003 to download the compatibility pack). Once the 27MB Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System had been installed, I could work natively with the files, including the ability to save OpenXML from within Office 2003 applications, disproving my earlier predictions of file format nightmares.

Amit Agarwal has more information about working with the OpenXML file formats on his Digital Inspiration blog.