Simon Taylor and Elizabeth Montalbano

Microsoft Corp. said it would offer its Word, Excel and PowerPoint document formats as open standards, a move that could spark a war with technology rivals over standard document formats. The development comes as a group of technology rivals led by IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. are mobilizing a global effort to push the OASIS consortium's Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as a global standard format for these kinds of documents.