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

what are you talking about?

[mcmonkey]

I do equations with MS Word on a daily basis, and the process is nothing like you describe.

What is this 'basic' tab you keep referring to? And why are you clicking on "=" and "+"? Is your keyboard missing those keys? Speaking of clicks, you can use the arrow keys to navigate the equations. There's no need to click all over the place.

Of course, you'd also have fewer clicks if you worked in any sort of logical order. In your OOo example, did you type '+' and then '^', then 'x' and '2'? No? Then why would you work in that order with Word? Working with the equation editor isn't always a linear left-to-right process, but you're all over the place.

There's no doubt the built-in Word equation editor is not the best, but your example is FUD--you've gone out of your way to make things harder than they need to be.

You could do the same thing by TYPING "z=x+y". Shift-arrow to select x+y. Click the root symbol. Shift-arrow to select the root symbol. Click the fraction icon. Type "2". Click the x. Click the superscript symbol. Type "2". Click the y. Click the superscript symbol. Type 2.

For simple examples such as this one, text entry will almost always beat the point-and-click builder, but it is the 21st century, and there are occasions when it helps to utilize the graphical aspects of a graphical user interface.

For more complex equations I find it helpful to have the symbols laid out as I compose. Are there any developers here who have never had an issue with a misplaced/missing } or )? I don't really feel like having to debug my Word docs.