ISO/IEC 29500-4:2016 defines a set of XML vocabularies for representing word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On the one hand, the goal of ISO/IEC 29500 is to represent faithfully the existing corpus of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been produced by Microsoft Office applications (from Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008, inclusive). It also specifies requirements for Office Open XML consumers and producers. On the other hand, the goal is to facilitate extensibility and interoperability by enabling implementations by multiple vendors and on multiple platforms.

ISO/IEC 29500-4:2016 defines features for backward-compatibility and that are useful for high-quality migration of existing binary documents to ISO/IEC 29500. These features are used only by documents of conformance class WML Transitional (§2.1), SML Transitional (§2.1), or PML Transitional (§2.1). These features are sometimes needed for high-quality migration of existing binary documents to ISO/IEC 29500.