Eight months ago, and together with three partners, Microsoft started and funded an Open XML Translator project. Version 1.0 of the plugin has been released with plans for a spreadsheet and presentation translator plugin ready for previews in May, and a final release in November, 2007.
This plugin facilitates the conversion of documents from one format to the other. For example, if you are using Microsoft Word with the plug-in, you can choose to open and save documents in ODF instead of the Opem XML format, the new industry standard.
Tom Robertson who is the general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft says,
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I always save my stuff in ODT and then send multiple formats if I need to give it to someone. I usually send the ODT and a PDF since those are both pretty standard. I find that saving my documents to word has a tendency to ‘lose something in the translation,’ so I try to avoid .doc as much as possible.
Yeah, I hate saving my stuff in OpenOffice.org as a DOC format because of the outcome if you have anykind of special formatting. PDF’s are always the safe way to go and they are so simple to do in OpenOffice.org anyways.
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