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,
“We believe in delivering interoperability by design; in this case, by working with partners and members of the open source community we have achieved that goal. The translator project has been built to be independent of any one application, and has proved to be useful for both Microsoft and our competitors in solving an interoperability challenge for customers.â€
The plug-in can be downloaded at SourceForge.net, and since the project started, it has been downloaded over 50,000 times. Many small businesses who can’t afford Microsoft’s products usually select OpenOffice.org as an alternative. If you receive a document from someone who uses OpenOffice, you won’t have to worry about how you’ll open it by using the ODF Converter.
People that use OpenOffice most-likely save their documents in Word format to begin with, just to make sure it works for everyone. However, every now and then you’ll come across documents that would be nice to open up without needing an additional application which is when this plugin would be useful.
It’s good to see Microsoft taking interoperability seriously and providing funds and resources to make it happen.
The official Microsoft press release can be found here.
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.
Under the “additional reading”, Flip4Mac isn’t a Microsoft company…Telestream has an distribution arrangement with them. Great company BTW. Lots of useful products, including a new DVD imaging app called Drive In. Check it out [flip4mac.com] Also my blogblurb about it [flip4mac.blogspot.com]