or can it? Some news out on the blogosphere about Microsoft releasing the entire spec to their binary formats(IE: .ppt, .doc, and .xls specifically)

No specifics on what version of those formats will be made available, nor on how far back the documents go. I for one, hope that I’ll be able to convert a .doc I wrote in 1994, and am able to open in Open Office, but not MS Office 2003!

Or, I could just stick with Open Office for the time being.

It appears that Microsoft is making an open-source converter for the binary formats, to OOXML, their “widely used” office document format. Widely used because everyone had a choice. Right.

Will this bode well for us? Or is this yet another brilliantly evil plan that falls over in execution?