Last week Microsoft announced it will be supporting industry-standard open file formats for the next release of Office, based around the eXtensible Markup Language, XML (and yes, it is an irritating way of capitalising the words!).

This is a major step forward, as it will allow word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs from any developer to work with Office files.

Unfortunately that does not help people like me, stuck with my valuable information in a file format that is obscure, complicated and inaccessible.

Let us hope that as part of their new commitment to openness the programmers at Microsoft start work on a comprehensive set of migration tools for older file formats.

After all, if Microsoft thinks its software is simply better and more usable than everyone else's, they should have no reason to hold on to their customers by unfair means.

Or am I missing something?