W
A Word document is never Transparent. From the GFDL: A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to thegeneral public ...The Word format specification is not available to the public.
Word documents can be read and written by a free software whose source code is available (openoffice). So I think that now we can say that the specification of the Word format is available to the public, even if it is not published by M$. (there might be an exeption for some unusual very complex word documents not fully understandable by openoffice, but from my experience this is only a very tiny proportion of word documents using some special feature like macros, etc.).
Olive