Microsoft will be competing with itself when it launches Office 12 with completely new OpenXML file formats at the end of the year, Corel warned today at the launch of its rival Wordperfect Office X3 suite.

Global product director Jason Larock said Microsoft would have to persuade people to switch to the OpenXML formats while 250 million users across the world were using the familiar old ones. Not only wopuld people have to learn to cope with two formats but Microsoft would also be asking them to get used to a new user interface.

Some features of the next Office interface, such as context-sensitive toolbars, had long been a feature of Wordperfact.

Larock said no product could match Wordperfect's support for a wide variety of formats and Corel would include OpenXML when Office 12 is released. "We work with Microsoft now and we will continue to work with Microsoft, which owns 90 percent of the market. We would basically cut ouirselves off if you didn't support the format."

But he admitted that X3 does not support the Open Document Format (ODF), which is being proposed as a rival standard, "because no customer that we are currently dealing with as asked us to do so."

X3 does however allow the import and export of portable document format (pdf) files, something Microsoft has promised for Office 12.

Corel's pdf implementation looked good, judging from Larock's short demonstration. Trying to extract coherent text from complex pdf files can be infuriating, and Corel appears to be taking a leaf out of  OCR packages by making intelligent guesses about text flow across columns.