ISO adopts OOXML format as international standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has adopted an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

The standard was approved by 86 percent of all countries voting, and by 75 percent of those countries participating in JTC1, the joint committee of the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Committee that organized the vote, according to a number of sources. To pass, it required the approval of 75 percent of all countries voting, and 66 percent of those countries participating in the committee, known as P-members.

Among the organizations relaying the information were Microsoft and industry standards consortium ECMA International. Microsoft first sent its OOXML document format to ECMA for approval, where it was adopted as standard ECMA-376. ECMA then submitted its standard to the ISO where, after numerous modifications, it has been adopted as ISO standard 29500.

While the ISO has sent the ballot results to the national standards bodies, it does not plan to announce them publicly until Wednesday.

The results were first disclosed in a document sent to the OpenDoc Society mailing list in a posting by a Dutch technical standards committee member, Michiel Leenaars.

Of the 87 countries that voted, 61 approved, 10 disapproved and 16 abstained. Among the P-members, 24 approved, eight disapproved and nine abstained, according to the document.

The full results the document contained are as follows: