MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?

J. Random Luser writes "Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'." From the ZDNet article: "Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn't a matter of principle. Microsoft isn't opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an 'extremely liberal' license."

Comments

Have you opened ODF in a text editor?

[Milican]

Well, I recently upgraded to OO.org v2.0. I was thinking how cool it is that it saves in an XML format and how I could probably read through the XML and pick out info from the spreadsheet and writer documents in a text editor. Wrong! Its not all binary, but it definitely looks like a jumbled up mess to the untrained eye. I have faith that the documents are indeed open, but as far as human readable XML that it is not.

JOhn

Re:Good, because OO's import filter sucks

[utnow]

oor... if you want to avoid being a duchecake... install MS Office at home. ;)

I don't understand why you folks torture yourselves for fun by forcing yourselves to use lower-quality software for the hell of it.