Today I spent a good chunk of the day working on a PowerPoint presentation.
My works development box has Office 2003 but the template I needed was Office 2007. No worries, I just downloaded the compatibility pack from Microsoft for Office 2003 and off I go. A few hours later and job done 
It is only when I try and load the presentation again that panic starts to sets in.
“File is corrupted, unable to load.” or something to that effect says the terse warning.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Ok, the words out of my mouth are not exactly that but I can’t put those in print. No help leaps out at me from Google, just lots of people in the same or similar boat when using OOXML.
I followed the news as Microsoft purchased the ISO standard for OOXML (Allegedly) so I know what a dog the file format really is. I use OpenOffice at home so know it can read OOXML files. As a last ditched attempt I install OpenOffice and run up Impress. It loads the file perfectly first go without any warnings!
The moral of this story. If you want to be sure you can re-open your documents and must use Microsoft, pick the 2003 based formats. OOXML is a dog that Microsoft can’t even make work well. Better still, if you can use ODF!
