Open PAGES File

Document File Formats

Word processing applications are used on every day basis by millions of computer and mobile device users. No office can function without a computer with word processing application. There are several major office software packages which have a word processing application as part of them. Since they were developed by different software vendors, they use different file formats to store textual documents.

Microsoft Word file formats

Until Microsoft Office 2010 release Microsoft Word used Compound File Binary Format (CFBF) to store document information. Files in CFBF format had DOC extension and were based on a proprietary specification. Reading these files in 3rd party software was problematic without special conversion tools. The best way to read such files in other applications was to use Microsoft Word to export them to other format.

Starting from Microsoft Office 2010 Office Open XML format was introduced and file extension for Microsoft Word processing documents was changed to DOCX. DOCX file is a compressed file with data in XML format conforming to Office Open XML specification. Since Office Open XML is an open and license free product there are many tools which can read and convert from DOCX to other formats. DOCX is also supported by many other word processing applications. Documents in DOCX format could be uploaded to Microsoft OneDrive and edited using online version of Microsoft Word.

Apple Pages file formats

Apple Pages file format is based on Apple iWork file format. Until Apple iWork 2009 release Apple used compressed archives with XML files in it. But starting from iWork 2009 new binary file format was introduced which replaced XML files inside the archive with binary ones. IWA file extension is used by Apple iWork to store binary information about the document.

LibreOffice file formats

LibreOffice uses Open Document Format (ODF) to store documents. Open Document Format is an open standard based on OpenOffice.org XML specification. ODF is XML based format available free of licensing fees. Word processing applications use ODT and FODT to store word processing files in ODF format.