Office 2010 Offers Open XML and Open Document Ballot Screen

Customers in the European Union that will opt to run the next iteration of the Office productivity suite from Microsoft will be presented with a ballot screen asking them to choose the default file format for the three main components of the program, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users will have to select either Open XML or ODF, the Redmond company confirmed officially to Mary-Jo Foley, after Neowin published a story accompanied by the file format screen which is apparently being served to users of the Release Candidate version of Office 2010.

“Microsoft Office supports many different file formats. Choose the format you would like to use as your default in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint,” reads the message presented by the productivity suite. The choices given to end users are Open XML, the otherwise default file format of Office 2007 and Office 2010, and Open Document, the default standard of the open source Open Office productivity suite, available for free.

For Office Open XML formats, Microsoft writes “ Choose this option to set your defaults to use the file format designed to support all the features of Microsoft office.” Whereas for the Open Document formats the company notes “Choose this option to set your default to use the ODF file formats designed to support the features of third-party productivity applications that also implement ODF. Many features of Microsoft Office are supported by ODF but some content or editability may be lost upon save.”

I recently installed Office 2010 RC Build 4734.1000, and as an EU citizen, and I must tell you that I haven’t seen the Office 2010 ballot screen when I deployed the latest development milestone of the productivity suite. And I did a range of installs on multiple computers, both the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, while I was hunting for bugs to report (still haven’t found a single bug in RC). In fact, users can get a taste of the Office 2010 RC Build 4734.1000 by viewing a 110-Screenshot Gallery I cooked up, but will not be able to see the option to choose the default file format.