Randall,   I agree with the undesirability of proprietary formats.  Even now I cannot ship Powerpoint and Excel files in Office Vista format to my computers that are only running Windows 2000 or XP, and have them understood.   The claim is that the Office formats, being based on XML, are more standards compliant, but understanding the specific data is anothewr issue. I don'y now of these .pptx and xlsx formats contain any useful metadata. Gio PS At one point the British Archives were promoting their adoption of MS Word 3.01 to the equivalent EU organization. The EU did not bite. Gio <div>On 7/5/07, Randall Neff <<a href="mailto:randall.neff@gmail.com">randall.neff@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> At the last meeting, Henry was demonstrating saving PowerPoint files into his demo content managment system.  I was concerned about saving files in secret, proprietorial formats.  Also, the metadata did not record WHICH version PowerPoint format. The British National Archives has the same sort of problems, and Microsoft is going to save the day through virtualization technology. Of course, you need a copy of every Microsoft OS and application version to make it work. The article doesn't mention different floppy disk sizes, and ignores other operating systems and non Microsoft applications. Warning of data ticking time bomb <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm"> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm</a> My suggestion for SPG content is we store it in multiple forms, while we have access to the proprietary software application. So we save the original proprietary binary format, a image sequence format such as .png, and a text format like .txt or .rtf (for searching). Another problem for future display is that some document formats assume specific fonts and font metrics are available in the computer excuting the application. Randall. _______________________________________________ SCC_active mailing list <a href="mailto:SCC_active@mail.computerhistory.org">SCC_active@mail.computerhistory.org</a> <a href="http://mail.computerhistory.org/mailman/listinfo/scc_active"> http://mail.computerhistory.org/mailman/listinfo/scc_active</a> </blockquote></div> -- Gio Wiederhold <a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/people/gio.html">infolab.stanford.edu/people/gio.html </a>