Microsoft to Support ODF via Plug-In

Apache4857 writes "It appears that Microsoft has finally caved. BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft is sponsoring an open source project to enable conversion between Open XML in Office 2007 and OpenDocument formats. The project, hosted on Sourceforge.net, made its initial release today. The Word 2007 conversion utility is expected to ship ship by the end of 2006, and similarly conversion utilities for Excel and PowerPoint are expected early next year." See the announcement in Brian Jones' blog (Jones is the Microsoft program manager responsible for Office file formats).

Comments

Corrected URL

[Rosyna]

The correct url is http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07/ 05/657510.aspx the link in the summary was missing the trailing x.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[Tribbin]

Installation

Double click the MSI file to install the Add-in for Word 2007.

If installation is successful, you should see a new "ODF" entry in the "File" menu in Word 2007. It allows you to either import an ODF text file or export your current working document as an ODF text file (note that during development process, those functionalities might be temporary unavailable).

Important note: The ODF file opened by the add-in is converted into Office OpenXML (Office 2007 new file format) and imported into Word as a read-only file. If you want to save it as ODF, you have to use the "Export as ODF" button and provide a new file name (that can be the same as the current file name).