The ISO/IEC standardization of Office Open XML was controversial and embittered, with much discussion both about the specification and about the standardization process.

A technically equivalent set of texts is published by Ecma as ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats-2nd edition (December 2008) they can be downloaded from their web site. The resulting four-part International Standard (designated ISO/IEC 29500:2008) was published in November 2008 and can be downloaded from the ITTF. After initially failing to pass, an amended version of the format received the necessary votes for approval as an ISO/IEC Standard as the result of a JTC 1 fast-tracking standardization process that concluded in April 2008. This standard was then fast-tracked in the Joint Technical Committee 1 of ISO and IEC. Microsoft submitted initial material to Ecma International Technical Committee TC45, where it was standardized to become ECMA-376, approved in December 2006. Main article: Standardization of Office Open XML The presentation was made to Ecma by Microsoft's Jean Paoli and Isabelle Valet-Harper. Microsoft announced in November 2005 that it would co-sponsor standardization of the new version of their XML-based formats through Ecma International as 'Office Open XML'. The Excel and Word formats-known as the Microsoft Office XML formats-were later incorporated into the 2003 release of Microsoft Office. In 2002, a new file format for Microsoft Word followed. In 2000, Microsoft released an initial version of an XML-based format for Microsoft Excel, which was incorporated in Office XP. Microsoft Office 2013 and later fully support ISO/IEC 29500 Strict, but don't use it as the default file format because of backwards compatibility concerns. Microsoft Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, full support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict. ISO and IEC standardized later versions as ISO/IEC 29500.

Ecma International standardized the initial version as ECMA-376. Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.

Openoffice 3.1