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

Just one day after...

[Burz]

...SoftMaker's Dr. Martin Sommer states that an ODF plugin for MS Office would hinder acceptance of alternative office suites. Then all of a sudden, MS is throwing in their support for an independant project that had started a few weeks earlier.

Not as convenient as native support

[Raphael]

This add-in is certainly a step in the right direction. But opening and saving files with this add-in is not as convenient as if the format was supported natively.

Here is an example of the problems that the users will face when using it (from the project home page):

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).

Basically, this add-in will encourage you to convert your ODF documents to OpenXML, but if you really insist and if you really want to save (sorry, export) as ODF, then it will let you do that as well. You will just have to re-type or re-select the file name.

Re:Or so they SAY it'll do that... some day.

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

The strangest aspect to me is the Open Document Foundation says they have a similar plug-in, but are very secretive about it and won't really give any details. Then MS just tosses on up on SourceForge for all to see. A bit of a role-reversal, but good for MS!

Clarifications

[The MAZZTer]

It's a plugin for Word, it's not a separate conversion utility as the article implies.

It can't handle manual page breaks it seems. Once I get OpenOffice.org on here to verify, I'm submitting their first bug report. :)

The default install directory seems to indicate this is a third-party tool, not an MS tool.

It doesn't add file types to the default Open/Save dialogs (the ideal solution). Instead, you import and export the files with their own dialogs. This also means hitting File/Save when you have an ODF file open will open up a save as dialog fro DOCX only.

Re:Excellent news

[CastrTroy]

Another good question is will we have to buy Office-07 to support ODF? It seems to me like the plugin will only work with Office-07. What about all the users of Office 97 onwards? Will they be stuck with not being able to read ODF documents, or not being able to convert their .doc files to ODF?

...but who is actually extending this time?

[plj]

It is interesting that Jones accuses OO.o for extending the ODF spec. From his blog:

“OpenOffice has actually made the decision to extend the spec in ways that don't actually appear to be allowed (like with numbering formats), and I'm not sure if that's the right way to go. I've seen a lot of problems when moving documents from OpenOffice to KOffice for example, and I'm sure these divergences from the spec don't help out. Is the right thing to extend in the same ways OpenOffice did, or is it best to wait for OASIS to release the next version of the spec and hope that it specifies some of those missing features? Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing, so if you do decide to extend the format like OpenOffice did, what happens when ODF 2.0 comes out and it specifies that feature differently from how OpenOffice did it? What about features that aren't in ODF or in OpenOffice? Should we create new extensions ourselves or just lose that information? It's going to be fun working with everyone to figure this stuff out.”

I'm not capable to judge whether this is true or just FUD, but it is interesting nevertheless.

Re:Embrace and Extend

[DavidTC]

Your average Government worker will be trained in this and follow the procedure in a totally mindless fashion.

Or it will be like the POSIX fiasco. At a certain point in history, government purchased opererating systems were required to support POSIX, which is an actual independent standard that various Unixes created after Unix fragmented. The theory was, you could write to POSIX, and your stuff would compile on any Unix, which generally works in practice. So MS tacked some POSIX support onto Windows NT.

Of course, no one actually wrote any programs that used POSIX. The government would purchase NT boxes and write Win32 programs, not POSIX ones. They were just required to purchase POSIX operating systems, not actually use POSIX.

Likewise, I'm imagine the government require programs that support ODF, but everyone uses the Word format to save and transport files, thus completely defeating the purpose.