MS Office 2007 to support ODF in SP2

[Caracalla]

You read that right whether for fear of anti-monopoly suits (fear Neelie Kroes!) or because more and more governments are starting to promote the use of open standards. MS office will be supporting odf 1.1 as of SP2, to be released in Q1 next year. While there may be a danger of MS running away with odf i do think this is a good thing. The more programs offer support for one another's standards, the better.
More info
Sorry if this is old news to some of you.

[bobban]

That's news to me, and wonderful to hear!

We get so many questions in here about transporting files between MS Office and Open Office, I hope they achieve good support for it.

Oh, and that article says they are also publishing details on their implementation of openXML which will hopefully make it easier for OOo to support better.

Good news.

[Hagar Delest]

Browsing the web, I found that document (dated May 2009) on the ODF Alliance blog: Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short.

Washington, DC, May 19, 2009. The OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance today cautioned that serious deficiencies in Microsoft's support for ODF needed to be addressed to ensure greater interoperability with other ODF-supporting software.

“Support for ODF represents an important and ongoing test of Microsoft's commitment to real-world interoperability,” said ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich. “Unfortunately, serious shortcomings have been identified in Microsoft's support for ODF. Putting potentially millions of ODF files into circulation that are non-interoperable and incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors is a recipe for fragmentation.”

Not really surprising.

[BlueDrache]

Perhaps this is M$ doing nothing more than "poisoning the well" so to speak?

[acknak]

I suspect it's more along the lines that it gives them a lot of flexibility when pitching their case.

To a customer who is required to buy a product that "supports ODF", they now meet the requirement. It usually doesn't matter that the ODF support doesn't work, as everyone just goes on working as they had been up to this point, using the MS-proprietary formats.

To a customer who actually wants interoperable documents, they can say: "Yes, we support ODF, but look: this format specification is not adequate. See what bad results you get when you use products other than ours." Of course that's only due to their flawed implementation, but only the outsiders know or care about that.

I just can't see any way that MS will ever support bona fide interoperability. It would be commercial suicide if their Office customers could easily move to a different, far less expensive, product. Maybe they will slowly abandon lock-in by the file formats and move to lock their customers in through other technologies, e.g. Sharepoint.

[Hagar Delest]

I just can't see any way that MS will ever support bona fide interoperability.

+1.

[gsl1]

There is at least the sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/

-=> Gregg <=-

[aqualung]

There is at least the sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/

-=> Gregg <=-

That link now gives a "404 Not Found" error. However, the ODF plugin for Microsoft Office 2000 / XP / 2003 is still available on Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-too ... fice.shtml

[PGAGA]

Monday, May 23, 2011

I have found the filter here to work better than the native MS support.

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/download.html

Phil

[Hagar Delest]

For the record, the article pointing out especially the fact that MS Office removes the formulas in spreadsheets files: Does MS Office SP2 With ODF Support Really Work? Test Results Point to No. - Updated 3Xs.
And the original article from Rob Weir: Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability:

The new entry to the mix is Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, which has added integrated ODF support. Unfortunately this support did not fare well in my tests. The problem appears to be how it treats spreadsheet formulas in ODF documents. When reading an ODF document, Excel SP2 silently strips out formulas. What is left is the last value that cell had, when previously saved.

This can cause subtle and not so subtle errors and data loss.

[henke54]

Five years after being adopted as an official ISO standard, the Open Document Format (ODF) still appears to have a long way to go, despite the support it has received from politicians and administrative agencies. Andreas Kawohl from the civic centre and IT processing department at Freiburg City Council told Friday's session of the ODF Plugfest in Berlin: "ODF is a long way from being able to function as a standard format for exchanging documents". According to Kawohl, 2000 administrative staff in Freiburg are now using both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, with 70,000 OpenOffice documents generated over a six month period, but hardly anyone outside of the organisation is able to use them. ......................
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The WebODF JavaScript library, from Magdeburg-based company KO, could help encourage the use of ODF files. Jos van den Oever from KO explained that the browser-based software allows support for the open document format "for almost everything"............................
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http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/ ... 80507.html