Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it!

"Microsoft is trying to push new file formats that are using ZIP and XML. Are those new file formats any good for Office developers ? In other words, should anyone feel safe to make direct access to file parts, and start getting free of running instances of Microsoft Office and its COM object model, usually through VBA ?"

Dutch not-for-profit venture capitalist NLnet Foundation has called on Microsoft to release its older file formats into the public domain to enable businesses, open source-developers and the standards community to better access their own documents in the future, and to help them get Microsoft's products to work with the new open standard ODF.

This is a roundup containing three articles about Microsoft Office's service pack, which blocks access to older microsoft file formats.

This is an editorial about file conversions. It starts with a story about Free Software Magazine and our struggle with article formats, and continues explaining why the world needs to get rid of Office Open XML, which could create more problems than the Microsoft monopoly itself.

Like it or not, one of the most important features of any Microsoft Office alternative is being able to read Microsoft Office files.

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

What happened and why open formats matter! Tucked in with the many security updates (and the restoration of one’s ability to paste text from a web page into a Word document!), a very interesting modification to the Office 2003 software waits quietly for installation with Service Pack 3. These events with Office 2003 should act as a cautionary tale of proprietary product, vendor, and platform lock-in.

Nautilus is the default file manager used in Gnome by most of the Linux distributions, now even though nautilus is extremely user friendly and has wide array of features (including ability to extend it's feature set with scripts and extensions). All these features does make nautilus bit resource hungry especially if you are using older machine.