TDF Community Blog

In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open standards are so beneficial, why aren’t they universally adopted?

The answer, in the case of document formats, lies in a single page produced by Microsoft Office. Getting rid of it is harder than it seems.

A file is never just a file

When you save a document on your computer, you are choosing a format — that is, the language in which your document is written in a way that the computer can understand: the set of rules that determines how words, tables, images and formatting instructions are stored and, consequently, how they can be retrieved, shared and read in the future.

For decades, the dominant format for office documents has been that produced by Microsoft Office. Initially as binary files with extensions such as DOC and XLS, then as XML-based formats introduced with Office 2007: DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. These formats are used by hundreds of millions of people. They are the lingua franca of offices, schools, public administrations and courts around the world.

Furthermore, in significant and decisive ways, they are proprietary — meaning they belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft’s interests in ways that may not align with the interests of users.

Understanding how all this works — and why it matters far beyond mere matters of software preference — is the aim of this article.

The architecture of dependency

Proprietary formats create dependency through a mechanism that is simple in principle and extraordinarily effective in practice: they make the data contained in a document inseparable from the software used to create it.

This is not a law of physics, but a design choice.

An open format — a format whose specifications are published, freely available and implementable by any software without restrictions — stores information in such a way that any compliant application can read, write and reproduce it faithfully.

A proprietary format, by contrast, may contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviours that only the original software implements correctly. The document may be opened by other applications, but it cannot always be reproduced faithfully.

The practical consequence is familiar to anyone who has tried to open a Microsoft Office document in another application: the formatting becomes distorted, bullet points shift, tables lose their proportions, and headings appear different.

A presentation that looked polished in PowerPoint seems slapdash in a different viewer: the content is all there, whilst the document, strictly speaking, is not.

This is “lock-in”: it is not a padlock, it is not a technical ban, it is not a contractual restriction, but a silent and persistent friction that makes any work outside the Microsoft ecosystem seem slightly off, slightly unreliable, slightly unprofessional — and ensures that the easiest route is to return to the tools that produce documents with the expected appearance.

The standard that isn’t a standard

Microsoft formats have been submitted to international standardisation bodies and approved. This has been used, time and again, to argue that concerns about “lock-in” are exaggerated — that OOXML, the Office Open XML format, is as open a standard as any other, and that the playing field is level.

The reality is considerably more complicated.

The standardisation of OOXML was one of the most contested processes in the history of ISO: national standardisation bodies reported procedural irregularities, and the votes were contested. The process has left an indelible mark on the credibility of international standards, and has resulted in a specification of extraordinary length and complexity — running to thousands of pages — which did not describe a format designed for interoperability, but rather the existing behaviour of Microsoft Office, including legacy behaviours, undocumented features and implementation details specific to Microsoft’s source code.

No other software could fully implement the format, yet it was required to do so out of respect for its users, who needed to exchange documents with Microsoft users.

The version of OOXML that was standardised — OOXML Transitional — initially co-existed with a stricter variant, OOXML Strict, which eliminated most of the problematic legacy elements, but not all. Moreover, Microsoft Office has always used OOXML Transitional as the default format, and has relegated OOXML Strict to the bottom of the options (to prevent it from being used).

The practical effect is that the format used daily by hundreds of millions of people is the one that only Microsoft’s own software implements correctly, whilst the cleaner variant — which other software could actually support — is not used, and has now even disappeared from some versions.

A standard that only one implementation fully supports is, from a functional point of view, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate.

Lock-in, from the individual to the institution

Dependence on document formats is the main mechanism of lock-in, but it is not the only one. We discussed the layering of dependencies at length in a previous article, so we will not revisit the subject here. Levels of dependence vary depending on the importance of the documents involved and the size of the organisation producing them.

For an individual user, a document with altered layout is simply an inconvenience. For a law firm, it may mean that a contract submitted to court does not match the version in the client’s file. For a hospital, it may mean that a clinical form is printed incorrectly. For a government department, it may mean that a document appears differently depending on the software used: a silent and unintended form of unequal access to public information.

At the level of public administration, this dependency takes on a dimension that goes beyond operational efficiency. A government that archives official documents in a format controlled by a private company has, strictly speaking, delegated the custody of its institutional memory to that company. Today, documents are readable because Microsoft continues to support the format, but whether they can be read in twenty years’ time will depend on the company’s decisions, for reasons that have nothing to do with the public interest.

This is not a hypothetical risk: formats are phased out, software versions change, and features present in one version of Office may behave differently — or not work at all — in another.

The history of digital documents is littered with files that cannot be opened because the software with which they were created no longer exists or no longer works on modern systems. Proprietary formats accelerate this risk by concentrating the knowledge needed to interpret them within an organisation whose commercial interests may, at any time, diverge from the interests of those who depend on access to their own documents.

What true sovereignty requires

A truly independent document — one that displays identically on any system, in any country, for any user, regardless of the software used — requires informed choices at every stage of its creation.

At the format level, it requires an open standard such as the Open Document Format (ODF), whose specifications are published, freely implementable and managed by a body independent of any single vendor. ODF is an international ISO standard that has undergone a legitimate standardisation process and whose specifications can be fully implemented by any software that chooses to do so. LibreOffice, the leading open-source office suite, uses ODF natively. The same should apply to any other self-respecting open-source office application.

In terms of fonts, it requires open fonts, the designs of which are published under licences that allow any software to implement them and any user to install them without cost or restrictions. Open font repositories offer a wide range of high-quality options that have no proprietary dependencies.

In terms of templates and workflows, it requires institutional policies that specify open formats and open fonts as the default for all official documents — not as an aesthetic preference, but as a governance requirement, in the same way that a public administration might specify accessibility standards or data protection requirements.

At the archiving level, this requires a commitment to formats specifically designed for long-term preservation — such as PDF/A for documents intended for permanent archiving — whose specifications are public and whose readability does not depend on the commercial decisions of a single supplier.

None of this is technically complex, but it requires a conscious decision by someone with the authority to do so.

A document is never innocent

A document is an argument made visible. It is also, always, a set of dependencies made invisible.

When an institution sends a letter formatted with a proprietary font, embedded in a proprietary format, produced by proprietary software, it is not communicating information but perpetuating a dependency — in workflows, in the expectations of correspondents, in staff memory and in the implicit message to recipients — that this is precisely how documents work, that there are no alternatives, that the infrastructure of written communication belongs to someone else, and that it has always been this way.

Digital sovereignty begins with the recognition that this is a choice: the file format is a choice, the font on the page is a choice, and the software is a choice. And choices, unlike facts, can vary.

That document, which continues to be regarded as a “seemingly” innocent piece of paper, is in reality no longer a piece of paper — and hasn’t been for some time — but an executable file that is interpreted by software, and as such is no longer innocent but, in many cases, the insidious tool of lock-in.

Microsoft Office Icons: Ms Office Icon Vectors by Vecteezy
Protest against OOXML: Techrights
Innocent piece of paper: The Mazloom Law Firm, LLC