I wrote that to prove my point: Apple does NOT have to implement the entire standard in order to get Pages to read Office 2007 documents. So yes, there are MANY standards that are less than 6000 pages. And the standard that defines HTML is only a couple hundred pages. Oh and the OpenDocument format which is supported by OpenOffice is only 1000 pages, or 1/10th the size of the OpenXML format. Notice how 90% of the WWW is coded to Internet Explorer's standards, NOT the W3C's standards? If Office 2007 has a bug that defies the standard, that will BECOME the new standard by sheer numbers. This is Microsoft there's what the standard says, and what Microsoft implements. And there's nothing stopping them from doing the same thing with OpenXML. Apple just chose to not inplement the entire standard since Microsoft took the standard, chewed it up and shoved it up everybody's collective ass. Heck, Office 2006 and lower are actually RTF documetns, which is itself a standard. Safari doesn't implement most of CSS 3 and only 'most' of CSS 2.

So what? There are literally hundreds of standards that are partially implemented. So I estimate the probability of Open XML support on the Mac platform at EXACTLY 100%! al., WILL have comply with our Microsoft overlords. Given the status of the Office suite (quote above), Wordperfect, OpenOffice, et. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that Office 2007 (Mac/Win), iWork 2007, and Leopard will fully support Open XML. In short, don't count on Leopard being able to import any type of complex (read: actual business-world) document anytime. Even Microsoft's Mac BU has admitted the standard is so complex they aren't even going to implement it (they're porting the Office code from the PC product). It would take Apple a LONG time to fully implement it.

The Office 2007 file format is a huge 5000+ page behometh of a standard that has only now (this month) been ratified. When I tried it last month on a document a co-worker gave me, it showed an entire paragraph as raw RTF escape sequences. Embedded line art, complex tables or even a table of contents in a Word document can render Pages hopelessly confused. Pages chokes on fairly simple Word documents. Wouldn't surprise me if iWork will have it even before that.Īnybody that has tried to use the Tiger support for Office document formats will realize that Apple's promise for the Office 2007 file formats is not all that it's cracked up to be. In Leopard, any Cocoa app will support them.

Mac equivalent of excel free