XML will be the file-save default in next year’s Microsoft Office 12, the company has announced. The move is being made to allow Office to be more open to developers and other applications.

File compression should improve as well, and developers will be able to strip out metadata more easily than they can today, and thus integrate it with other applications. The move will also allow competing products, such as Sun’s OpenOffice, to achieve better replication of Microsoft’s file formats.

Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice-president for Office, said, “The new formats improve file and data management, data recovery, and interoperability with line-of-business systems beyond what is possible with Office 2003 binary files. Any program that supports XML, it doesn't have to be part of Office or even from Microsoft, can access and work with data in the new file format.”