Microsoft's Open XML Project Deemed a Short-Term Fix

Seeing as it can't save (you have to export to save, which is a lossy operation), you can't really work on ODF files. E.g., if you wanted to change the spelling of a word in a ODF file, you'd need to import it (ODF->OpenXML->Office), change the word, then export it as a new filename (Office->OpenXML->ODF) which will chew the document up.

It's not a workable solution for anything other than a one-time translation to a different format.

> It's not a workable solution for anything other than a one-time translation to a different format.

And, you expected???

Yeah, you expected MS to *really* make it as easy to use ODF as their magic money-making black boxes?

Remember, this is only stage 1 for them: embrace. They must prolong this stage until they can figure out how to do 2, extend, and 3, extinguish.

The plugin is not developed by MS and is only in it's first release. Give it a chance.

That said, it's a mess at the moment. I've had a play with it and it's not nice with some very stupid formatting oddities that favour Office 2007 (oh surprise surprise). Since it's not possible to save or export as .odt the obvious choice is save as .doc (since .doc is usable in OpenOffice right?), well not anymore. The document I saved in .doc and then opened in OOWriter had lost 90% of it's formatting. The thing is, that formatting was still all fine when the .doc was opened in Word2007. So this means that the .doc format has been changed so that it adds stuff that only Word2007 can read and render(?). Some way of killing off OpenOffice must be in the thoughts of MS.

Microsoft will (probably) reluctantly make it so that .odt can be opened in Word2007 seeing as how some EU Gov's are moving towards mandating .odt for all public documents but in what way does it serve MS to have it so that Word saves to odt? It serves them to make it as hard as possible for anyone to use .odt thus driving them to use Office2007.

Of course, all this is mere speculation and we will have to wait and see...

Yup, it's hard to use.

Big shock coming from MS, no? As I 'blogged a few days ago, MS're only here to appear reasonable in public (well, regulatory) eyes. Here, you can see some of that unpacking.

Gladly, there are still competing 'converters'.