Recently I've been scouting around Stack Overflow looking for Open XML-related questions - it's always interesting to see what real people are doing with technologies you've been involved in. One topic that often comes up is the question of how to...

One thing implementers of Open XML often get in touch with me about is test documents. Understandably, any implementer wants to test their implementation against some corpus of test material, but so far there’s been no straightforward place to find...

Just back from another WG4 meeting, so I thought I’d write up a few thoughts. My trip was slightly longer than usual this time, mainly because I was with Doug at the XML Prague conference the preceeding weekend. Doug wrote a trip report about XML Prague...

When I started this job, I had a hunch that I'd be living a little more in the open source world, and working more with FOSS-type people. This has turned out to be true, and on WG4 I've been involved quite a bit with people who are trying to make money...

As you probably know by now, I spend a lot of my time writing up proposed edits to the file format standard IS 29500 in Word. The end result of what I'm doing always ends up being sent to my ISO colleagues on WG4 in another document. I'll be editing something...

This follows up on my post earlier this week about where the documentation for Office 2007's formats live. I am powerless to make you do anything you don't want to, of course, but I'd strongly encourage you to read that one first as I'll be building on...

Since we started using XML-based file formats, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of customers who want to read and write those files from applications that aren’t Office. That’s great, because that was one of the things we had hoped...

WG4 met last week in a rather humid Tokyo – I’m just back now after some travel headaches and I wanted to share a few thoughts. "Most Productive Meeting Ever" Well, perhaps not the world record holder, but t he convener remarked...

WG4, the group tasked with maintaining IS 29500, met last week in Helsinki. This was my third WG4 meeting, so I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. If I had to choose the topic that dominated this WG4 meeting, it would be extensions. This...

It may not surprise you to know that I get a free copy of Word and, in my new job in the standards area, I spend a lot of time in Word writing and reviewing documents. I like Word, although in a past life I spent two years working as a Word VBA developer...

It seems wrong not to start a new blog with some sort of introduction, so here it is. My name is Chris Rae - I've helpfully entitled my blog similarly, so you can't possibly forget. I've worked for Microsoft for three years now - until recently I worked...