[Golden Eagle]

Next question?

No need to ask a quesiton, since OSS applications can read/write MS formats as well as PDF they should qualify just as PDF does. MA is being hypocritical, without question with their bias.

[NJ_gent]

"since OSS applications can read/write MS formats as well as PDF they should qualify just as PDF does."

That's just it; Microsoft modifies the proprietary formats they use with each new release, attempting to obfuscate the formats to the greatest extent possible. Create a document with a lot of formatting in Microsoft Word 2003 and open it in Microsoft Word 2000. Assuming it opens without error, it's likely to have some bizarre layout that looks little to nothing like what you originally created. That's why some of the formatting in Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc documents is lost when importing to something like Openoffice. If they kept to their own standard, those sorts of issues wouldn't happen.