Office's formats are now open, and have been for a long time, now - they're basically just zip archives full of XML files. Whether they're easier or harder to

Office's formats are now open, and have been for a long time, now - they're basically just zip archives full of XML files. Whether they're easier or harder to work with is maybe a topic for debate. My experience from working with them is that OXML tends to be easier to work with than ODF in simple cases, in part because of better open source library support on more languages, and more StackOverflow-type advice. (Yes, open source support for the Microsoft formats really is quite a bit better than for the OpenOffice ones these days.) But it also tends to be the one that produces really gnarly compound documents that are just impossible to make sense of. I'm not sure that's because the format allows for more complexity, though, so much as because MS Office makes it easier for the kinds of people who use templates that look like spiral bound notebooks with Comic Sans type to create trouble.