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Office + OpenDocument, Never Say Never

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'll-believe-it-when-i-see-it dept.

barryfreed writes "There's a blog entry by Andy Updegrove at ConsortiumInfo.org that says Microsoft has officially stated to him that support of OpenDocument in MS Office could happen. Microsoft sent the statement in a response to an article Updegrove wrote called Massachusetts and OpenDocument: A Brave New World?"

6 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. OpenDoc by russellh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dont' call it OpenDoc...

    sigh...

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    must... stay... awake...
  2. Re:Support will be useless for the most part by generic-man · · Score: 4, Informative

    Office 12 will not write .doc by default, but rather an XML-based format called .docx. More information is available at the Microsoft Office XML Formats blog.

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    For more information, click here.
  3. Re:Completely different. by generic-man · · Score: 3, Informative

    The original title of this article was "Office + OpenDoc, Never Say Never." The editor corrected the headline, so all the posts saying "Hey, I remember OpenDoc as something different" are now complaining about nothing.

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    For more information, click here.
  4. Wow, someone should have proofread the abstract by petree · · Score: 3, Informative
    Wow, someone should have proofread the abstract

    Here's the abstract from the featured article:
    Abstract: For a period of 20 months, the Information Technology Division (ITD) of Massachusetts has been considering certain amendments to its internal information technology policies relating to the use of open formats when saving documents created by the Massachusetts Executive Agencies. The impetus for such a change is to prevent vendor lock in, and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will not become inaccessible in the future due to changes in proprietary software , or the discontinuance of support for such software. On September 21, 2005, the proposed amendments became final, and Massachusetts became the first jurisdiction in the world to mandate the saving of documents using only software that complies with the OpenDocument OASIS Standard or the Adobe PDF format. This article describes the history of both the process followed by the ITD as well as that of the OpenDocument OASIS Standard, summarizes and assesses the arguments for and against the amendments made by those that offered public comments, and finally seeks to evaluate the potential impact of the Massachusetts decision on further government information technology policy evolution around the world.
    Maybe they meant: "and also to lessen the likelihood that public information will (remove: "not") become inaccessible in the future due to changes in proprietary software."

    Maybe they need to worry less about the format being open and more about the text making sense ;)
  5. FOr all you Office users... by Eric_Cartman_South_P · · Score: 4, Informative

    JUST DO IT. Go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and download it. It installs cleanly, uninstalls cleanly, and does not interfere at all with your current install of MS Office (just choose "NO" when asked if you want to link OpenOffice to MS Office file types).

    Use it, and I bet most, if not all of you, will find yourself not needing MS Office.

    Oh, and try that Save to PDF button. Yum.

    Good night, and good luck!

  6. OOo does the same thing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you open a .doc file, you get the same kind of message when you save. I want to keep a certain document in .doc format for my co-workers, but I only want to use OOo. So they penalize me with this stupid form that you can't turn off.