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Loading...The timing could not have been better. More than a month ago, we heard that Microsoft would drop support for PDF in the upcoming Office 2007 suite since Adobe might have sued them. And now, Microsoft is headed towards an entirely different direction by embracing the ODF Open Document file format. Granted — comparing PDF and ODF is like the apple and oranges story — but they are both easily distributable file formats.
Microsoft will support Open Document
Microsoft has given in to pressure from several parties including some governments and announced that they are to offer new free open-source software which will make it possible for the Office suite to handle documents in rival formats. The company will develop tools that will enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument. This will allow Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.
Microsoft announces Open Document support for Office 2007
Microsoft had been leaving it to ODF supporters to add ODF support to Office 2007, and a group from OpenOffice.org has been working on a plug-in for more than a year. It’s not clear why Microsoft has changed its mind, but it has now organized and funded some third parties to do the job. (The schedule shows that Microsoft wants the plug-in finished by the end of this year, to meet Massachusett’s January deadline, so this may be a factor.).
Does ODF support really matter?
Today’s announcement is not native support for ODF, but rather a translator, that will let users open and save in the ODF format. That’s important for organizations that want to adopt this standard, such as the state of Massachusetts. But, if the idea is to come up with universal file formats, we’re still not quite convinced this is a big step forward. From a legal standpoint, it’s good that no company owns ODF. But from a practical standpoint, we already have file formats that are used by just about everyone — and those are the Microsoft Office formats, such as DOC and XLS.
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