The Ecma International Technical Committee TC45 is working to establish a standard for Office Open XML File Formats as described in its program of work at http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm. The committee’s work began in December 2005, and has continued via weekly 2-hour conference calls and regular face-to-face meetings. This month, the committee will make Draft 1.4 of the proposed standard available publicly.

This week (August 15-17), the committee held its fifth face-to-face meeting, this time in Redmond, Washington, USA. The meeting was hosted by Microsoft and attended by seventeen participants.

During the meeting, the committee:

• Devoted a large part of the time to reviewing and solving open issues.
• Approved a set of format and schema changes.
• Completed the Conformance clause and defined conformance requirements for arithmetic precision in SpreadsheetML.
• Completed the SpreadsheetML formula specification.
• Revised the DrawingML 2D transform specification.
• Redefined how to optionally insert controls (e.g., ActiveX, Java applets, etc) to support multiple platforms.
• Structured the standard into five parts to improve its overall readability.
• Planned to provide the Office Open XML Schemas in the Relax-NG format as an informative section in a future draft, in addition to the normative W3C XML Schema Definitions.