Which proprietary formats should be avoided

Proprietary formats are not exchange formats. Most of the data that you stored in proprietary formats and that are meant for diffusion or electronic publication can be easily converted to the corresponding open formats.
Main proprietary formats to be avoided include the following:

• MS Word formatted text documents (DOC)
• MS Excel tables and databases (XLS, XLW)
• MS Power-Point slide shows (PPS, PPT)
• 256 colors images (GIF)
• Bitmap images (BMP, TIFF see below)
• Vectorial images (WMF)
• MP3 Audio files
• Windows Media Audio (WMA)

Proprietary formats with public specifications

Some file formats remain proprietary although they have public specifications. The fact the specifications are available now is not an indication they will continue to be available in the future, with restrictions in their license's publication, format implementation or both. Some examples:

• Flash∞, owned by Adobe
• TIFF∞ - see the specification∞, owned by Adobe