Microsoft to support ODF (!!!)

The primary reason MS wants to add a "save as odf..." to MS Office would be to deter current MS Office users from installing OpenOffice solely for purposes of conversions. If it's there, folks are more likely to give it a try, learn it, love it, use it at home, convert others, etc.

Am I the only one who's leery of the phrase "Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project"?

Yes, 'Leary' is actually appropriate... Ya gotta be stoned or psychotic to believe that one.

One of the things that struck me is their claim of wanting the project to be transparent. Yet, while we did know that they were talking about ODF with a French firm, that firm wasn't publicised until now, and it seems to already have the project developed. How is that transparent? Naturally, they just *had* to comment on the supposed inferiority of ODF.

I will applaud their choice of the BSD license, assuming it's the modified version and not the old advertising clause version that is such a headache.

Quoting:would be to deter current MS Office users from installing OpenOffice solely for purposes of conversions

Now people might install MS Office solely for the purpose of conversions. A government could potentially convert all their .doc etc. files to ODF using only one single MS Office license.

As you can read in my comment (in the lead of the article), I am rather optimistic, though history has proved me wrong in being optimistic about MS moves more than once. We'll see.

Anyway, it's simple: Other people are gonna offer a conversion plugin, or Microsoft does it themselves. Simply because there's demand for it from the governments.

They are going to implement the ODF to OpenXML filter first, which means we can soon start sending native ODF files to MS Office users. Sounds good to me!

I just installed the odf add in for Word 2007 in the interests of investigation.

It enables Word to open .odt files but it only opens them in read only mode. "Save As .odf" is greyed out and will not work. (Bear in mind this was only released today and as such is not a final release). So in order to work on such a document you have to save to a "word friendly" format and cannot, at the moment, save as odt and return the file (though you could save as .doc). Some of the formatting is little off when opening a .odt (word "converts it") and when opening a "converted odt" file in Open Office in the "normal" .doc format, a lot of formatting seems to be lost. This formatting is not absent when opening the .doc file in Word 2007.

Early days...

Try viewing the roadmap... it's a Word document!

Also, note that none of Word's current installed base will be able to use this Word 2007 plugin because it only translates OpenXML to ODF. (Unless... I don't track MS Office.... are they backporting OpenXML to previous versions of Word?)

Observe what Microsoft is saying-

They are saying that they will- 1. Provide software to translate OpenXML to ODF 2. Sponsor an open source project (a third party)

They are NOT saying that they will: 1. Provide software to translate current MS Office formats to ODF 2. Develop the software itself rather than have a third-party developer do it.

Assuming they are serious about this, here's a question: How much funding has this third-party (or project) received?

From Microsoft's standpoint, this could be a great opportunity to demonstrate how open OpenXML really is.

An XML schema true to the spirit of XML should be pretty simple to transform into any other XML schema equally true to the spirit, presuming the basic data elements exist.

If, however, an XML schema is just window-dressing around binary blobs, then not so easy.

Hmmmmmm.............

yasofunny. Nothing at microshaft will change until all the top management have passed on to that Great Monopoly In The Sky.

tc -

Of course.

But...

MS keeps calling OpenXML and open standard. If it's really open, translating between it and ODF should be easy.

If it ain't easy (with the proviso that the data's gotta be there), it ain't open.

It is kind of funny that they can manage to translate their Doc format to their own XML format, but not to ODF. If it isn't incompetence, it must be shrewd.

> If it isn't incompetence, it must be shrewd

Maybe a little of both.

tc: Nothing at microshaft will change until all the top management have passed on to that Great Monopoly In The Sky.

I'm feeling kind of whimsical here so I'll pick on Tuxchick2 . . ;-)

Great Monopoly in the sky????? All the evidence I've seen suggests that Monopolists go the other direction!!

(Sorry, I said I was feeling whimsical so bear with me!)

Don K.

It seems this converter is deficient for real use of ODF. The Word 2007 plugin says it can only import the ODF read-only and by translating it to OpenXML which is a potentially lossy operation. To save the ODF document, it needs to be exported to a new filename.

This means that you can't use Word 2007 to work on a ODF file, as each time you need to make a change, you chew up the document. It's not a workable solution as-is.