Open XML Translator for Microsoft Word Available

narramissic writes "The first phase of a Microsoft-funded project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) has been completed. As a result, the Open XML Translator is now available for download in version 1.0 from SourceForge.net. A ComputerWorld article details the history of the project, discussing the work of companies like CleverAge and AztecSoft, as well as community efforts to bring this project to realization."

Comments

A Microsoft converter for a competing product?

[mandelbr0t]

Anyone else feel chills? Remember how good the Import/Export of .WPD files was in Word? I'm guessing that this will be of similar quality. At least it's OSS. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to bridge the gap between ODF and OpenXML. Best is to use OpenOffice and save as .DOC if you have to. Here's the Microsoft Press Release about it.

a question instead of a statement

[Ace905]

Can I ask, since the article doesn't seem to really explain -- what good is this? I know converting to XML is supremely important _in theory_ so that your documents can be easily parsed and used among other software applications - but say for example:

I have a document
I convert it to XML

then what? Is this excellent news in theory, or is there a demand for this?

I honestly don't know, I'm not claiming there isn't. Please tell me.

---
this isn't xml

Re:a question instead of a statement

[Steve001]

LordVader717 wrote as part of a post:

The problem is that OO will screw the formatting for anything that's a little more complex. If whenever you open something, everything is out of place, or you can't be sure that somebody will be able to open the document how you saved it, it's best just to use MS Office.

The problem is, this is not even viable in a pure MS Word environment. An often-heard complaint is that MS Word documents will look different on different computers, even if both users are using MS Word. I personally had to deal with the problem and ended up requiring people to FAX us a printed document to ensure that we saw precisely what the creator had. We tried to do it electronically, but what we received often did not match what the originator sent (we were both using the same version of MS Word).

Seems the common files are written in C#

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprised? Seems Microsoft just see this as another way to infect the better platforms with their CLR, an attempt to start the countdown on the patent timebomb.

If you're writing cross platform code at least have the decency to use C, C++ or Java, requiring a CLR is insulting.

MS was very much against this

[bendodge]

A while back a state IT Department (I think Massachusetts) decided to only use open-source document formats and talked back and forth with Microsoft. The head of the IT Department (or something similar) privatly asked some of Word's programmers, who said an odf/xml feature would be trivial to add, but MS flatly refused to make a plugin for Office to convert to odf/xml, even though it meant losing the state's patronage.

Microsoft is really determined to strangle open formats.

It's XML, but...

[bbtom]

Try reading Microsoft's documentation for OOXML. It's 6,000 pages long. Seriously. This is a great Microsoft PR stunt - yes, you've gotten your data in to XML format, but the XML format is so complicated that only the Microsoft programmers who wrote it can actually understand it. Part of the point about XML is interoperability. There's no way that sane people are going to read a 6,000 page Microsoft specification and write an XSLT to convert Microsoft OOXML in to a simpler and saner format. In short, this will not mean any competition with Microsoft. They buy PR in the geek community by saying "Office is going XML! Open data! Whee!" and making an XML format that's so complicated that nobody would ever use it. That's a pretty smart move. And it's a pretty dumb move on the part of ECMA. Congratulations on just giving your dignity away by signing off on a specification that's about nineteen times longer than War and Peace...

No document in living history is ever going to be so complicated that it needs to be in a format that's specification is 6,000 pages long. Part of the point about XML was that we should be setting up simple, domain-specific markup languages and extending already existing markup languages. OOXML is bad because it's needlessly complicated and obscure. Having visited the OOXML website, I'm missing a lot of things I expect. First, I'm missing schema. If these guys are serious about XML, where are the XSD/RNG schema? Secondly, where are the cross-platform translators - ie. XSLs? I'm missing some kind of high-level summary of how I'm supposed to parse the XML. If the only way of doing anything with OOXML is a closed, black-box Microsoft converter, then we still haven't really got anywhere.

Well, I'm breaking the cycle. All my documents are going to be either ASCII or a standard, non-obscure XML format like XHTML. Or something home-brewed and simple that can be easily transformed using XSL and XSL-FO. Screw Microsoft's phony attempt at interoperability. The Internet is interoperable by design. (X)HTML is interoperable by design. Let's prove to them that we mean interoperability by sticking to simple, sensible, semantically-based and scalable principles.

Re:Why is this such a big thing?

[vic-traill]

Just ask yourself, what profit motives does Microsoft have in making this work?

I'll second that emotion.

This initiative is at odds with Microsoft's decision to use Open XML for the Office suite. If they really think folks are going to be stuck with Open XML-format Office documents that they need converted into ODF (say, for distribution reasons) what is it that stops them from saving the documents as ODF directly out of the Office app?

I think Microsoft is feeling a little shaky on this issue. They've had great success historically using their own document formats - in particular, the lack of backwards compatibility between Word formats, which should have served to infuriate their user base when it realized they were being forced to upgrade just so they could open up Word docs sent to them by folks using a newer version of Word. Instead, this lack of compatibility brought Office upgrades *forward* into the next quarter. What a great scam, Steve! Thanks, Bill.

As other readers have noted, though, there are enough indicators out there (the on-going Mass. debacle, for one) that it seems MS is afraid of being left holding the incompatibility bag, so they're hedging their bets by supporting the creation of these translator modules.

All this just serves to leave them looking indecisive, IMHO. If they really give a shite about their users being able to share files, they'd jump on board ODF.

Are there functional advantages in Open XML compared to ODF?

Re:Relation to Linux?

[albalbo]

Michael Meeks made a version of this converter available which compiles using mono, see entry 2007-01-29 on http://www.gnome.org/~michael/ .

Realistically, there's no reason it even needs to be in C# - the various bits of wrapper could be rewritten into other languages, and the main work is done by an XSLT. The OpenDocument Fellowship might include a similar tool in future tool sets, translated to be a bit more native.