Mailing the story:

Most people know that you can use OpenOffice 2.0, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, to open up a Microsoft Office file and then save it in OpenOffice's native format—a zipped file that includes the document's contents as an XML file conforming to the OASIS OpenDocument standard. This works for Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. (See the XML.com article Opening Open Formats with XSLT for an example of the kind of simple new application that this makes possible: a stylesheet that extracts the slide titles and notes from a slideshow file and stores them in a single file that you can use as speaker notes when giving a presentation.) After opening one of these file types, you can even export them to an Acrobat PDF file.