Peter, comment from one of the MS people on Brian Jones' blog:
Since Open XML is the default format for Office 2007, I don't think that MS has changed a lot in the binary format and adapted the XML format as an afterthought. So the reference for binary compatibility would be Office 2003. Any problem that Office 2003 has with reading binary Word 98 files will probably also be there when converting Word 98 files to Open XML. But that's more or less a problem of the past. These quirks in backwards compatibility have already had their effects, and it's just about as useful to complain about those as it is to complain about any other problem in the old binary formats. I mean, there's a reason even MS want's to get rid of them.
It sounds like based on that compatibility between Office 2003/2004 and 2007 will be very good. My guess is the field stuff is probably significantly older than that though.
I'd push on them to have full-fidelity round-trip conversion of OXML with previous versions via their planned plug-in.
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