On Friday, Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft, quietly announced the release of Office Migration Planning Manager, a free tool kit designed to help corporate users convert their existing Office files to Office 2007"s new Open XML file format. The new technology reports how many and what kind of Office files exist on networked PCs. To use the 2.7MB tool, users will need either Access 2007 or a free, but as-yet-unreleased runtime version of the Access software.
Microsoft previously had released its Office Compatibility Pack, which can help IT administrators update files saved in Office XP or Office 2003 formats to Open XML. The compatibility pack includes a tool called the Office File Converter, which can be used to convert large numbers of files at the same time. Earlier versions of Office all save data in binary file formats but Open XML takes individual files, some of them in conventional binary formats, and repackages them in a compressed form.