In 2008, the battle had raged between the two document formats like ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML Microsoft. The editor, after a turbulent and controversial, had obtained the standardization of its format.

In addition, Microsoft pledged to support in its Office applications, files saved in the ODF. In late April, the editor included this support in Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. However, the open format struggling to integrate the application of Microsoft because of some bugs.

Beginning in May, Rob Weir, in charge of ODF at IBM (a competitor of Microsoft), issued the first criticism about the quality of format support in Excel 2007 SP2. He is simply impossible to save a file in Excel 2007 ODF compatible with other applications that support the open format.

Then in the Open Document Format Alliance criticize support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007 to SP2. The association notes and spreadsheets in ODF saved in Google Docs, KSpread, Symphony and OpenOffice do not open properly in Excel 2007.

The Open Document Format Alliance are several other shortcomings including lack of support encryption (password protection) ODF in Office 2007 files, and monitoring changes in the documents.

Finally, the association regrets that Microsoft has not included native support for ODF to earlier versions of Office, including Office 2003, the most popular among users. For these editions of the suite, interoperability with ODF requires installing a plugin (OpenXML / ODF Translator or Sun Plug-In 3.0).