It’s about time our National Archives started to realize this problem, much of which is tied (as you know) to MicroSoft’s proprietary formatting of data.
Thank goodness for OpenOffice and at least a few institutions recognizing the importance of data being in a completely open format.
Oh: on second read - this is the British National Archives, and they’re singing the praises of M$ - who have CAUSED a great deal of the problems of data by hiding their format “secrets”. There’s a long way to go yet... and again, I’m glad Open Office has released a good standard format, and that many data firms worked with them to develop something that was good.