ODF support coming in Office 2007 SP2

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 May 2008 06:12

Technology

Organisations and individuals that use Microsoft Office 2007 but favour the Open Document Format will be able to specify ODF 1.1 as the default once Service Pack 2 arrives. The bad news is that it isn't scheduled to arrive until the first half of 2009.

While Office 2007 SP2 will read and write ODF files in addition to existing formats, it also allow documents to be saved as XPS (XML Paper Specification) and PDF files without the need for additional software.

Microsoft has also announced it will join the OASIS technical committee working on the next version of ODF, and will also join the ISO/IEC working group for ODF maintenance.

The company will continue to work with the open source community on the further development of the OpenXML/ODF translator add-in for Office. Hosted on SourceForge, the project has delivered translators for Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Microsoft's buddies at Novell welcomed the announcement.

"Microsoft’s support for ODF in Office is a great step that enables customers to work with the document format that best meets their needs, and it enables interoperability in the marketplace," said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell.

"Novell is proud to be an industry leader in cross-platform document interoperability through our work in the Document Interoperability Initiative, the Interop Vendor Alliance and with our direct collaboration with Microsoft in our Interoperability Lab. We look forward to continuing this work for the benefit of customers across the IT spectrum."

Ironically, support for the IS29500 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML will not be delivered in SP2. Instead, it is a planned feature of the next major release of Office, which may be Office 2010.

Microsoft will also provide read/write compatibility with the Chinese Uniform Office Format (UOF) through continuing support for the open source OpenXML-UOF converter add-in for Office project hosted on SourceForge. At some later date support for UOF will be included in versions of Office sold in China.