Yeah, i see but my line of thinking was more along: "if I have this docx in 100 years time will I be able to decode its contents?" I think the answer is probab

Yeah, i see but my line of thinking was more along: "if I have this docx in 100 years time will I be able to decode its contents?" I think the answer is probably yes (pending possible " "premature" apocalyptic scenarios =) Regarding the zip compression, docx is a "Document Container File" standardized under ISO/IEC, so provided we still have computers and the standard documentation is still know, it should in theory be possible to DEFLATE the file. Inside you would find all the text content as xml, and as some have pointed out here, binary blobs as well. Those would be mostly font files and image files (or am I missing some others that would be important?). In my opinion the fonts would not be critical to the content meaning. The images would of course depend on what format they were encoded in. But that's a whole other discussion!