Office File Formats – What’s to be Done?

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Posters, Demos and Developer "How-To's"

This submission, which is intended for the 24x7 track (possibly Repository Rants), is intended to collect, weigh, and make recommendations for different approaches to normalizing and preserving office file formats (most commonly those originating from Microsoft Office or compatible platforms). These are a tricky case for a number of reasons, including the sheer number of potentially more preservation-friendly formats they can be exported to using existing open source tools, and the very low likelihood of preserving these files’ original layout using any of the available options. Still, they are ubiquitous in end-users’ workflows. Even if there is no single solution (as indeed there is not), a shared solution to handling these files is needed.