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Office + OpenDocument, Never Say Never
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?"
Most likely, Office will support OpenDocument format, both reading and writing, but will continue to aggressively develop new features for their own proprietary format that OpenDocument does not provide. In other words, they'll deal with it much like OpenOffice deals with Word format: They will read it (and write it), but not necessarily perfectly, and it won't be their preferred format.
Microsoft has to know by now that basic word processing functionality is far too common and easy to copy to make it a cornerstone of your product line. Word itself is an important part of Office, but most of the "innovation" in Office in recent years has not been in the Word component, but rather in the other pieces, and more importantly in how the different pieces interoperate.
Say Hello to ActiveOpenDocument-X! It's just like OpenDocument only it's more fully featured!!!*
.Net for best results.
*New features require Microsoft Office Vista XP 2008 Professional and
2. (Please don't correct me with a torch, I'm not an expert on this topic) but I don't doubt that MS would find some tiny loophole to sneak their own proprietary crap into OpenDocument formatted Office files which would have an adverse effect upon openning in any non-office program.
All they have to do is put the little balloon that says that "saving to OpenDocument may cause loss of formatting", which will cause 95% of the people out there to save to the proprietary file type.
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