Many alternative applications are also able to open MS Office files, such as OpenOffice, StarOffice, GNOME Office and KOffice. The main applications used to open MS Office files are part of the MS Office suite: See the article about MS Office Open XML. Since MS Office 2007, new file formats based on XML (docx, xslx, pptx) are used by default. MS Office also contain other applications such as MS Access which use different file formats not based on the OLE2 format. MS Office binary formats are widely used:
Specifications for the OLE2 Compound File format:.Format specifications and technical information.
