Novell adds Office 2007 support to OpenOffice

Angus Kidman
Tuesday, 05 December 2006 03:39

Your IT - Home IT

Less than a week after Microsoft's Office 2007 shipped to enterprise customers, Novell has announced plans to support its new file formats in its own version of rival suite OpenOffice.

Novell, which has become increasingly cosy with Microsoft in recent months following a collaboration and interoperability deal, is working on plug-in converters for the new Open XML formats introduced for Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007, and will ship them to customers as part of its own version of the open source suite.

The source code for the converters will also be made available, so such plug-ins are likely to quickly find their way into the main downloadable OpenOffice product. The Word converter is due for release in January 2007, while no time frames have been announced for the other formats.

Despite the new plans, Novell isn't entirely abandoning the existing OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice. "Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org," Nat Friedman, Novell's chief technology and strategy officer, said in a statement.