Microsoft has announced that it will – with a European partner – contribute to an open-source project for reading and writing Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio files. The Apache POI API is already used by various open source projects to handle Microsoft Office documents, but work is needed to add Office Open XML support as used by Office 2007 and 2008.
looks like the sourcesense guys are helping microsoft to establish a standard no one wants. not sure that is progress.