Microsoft announced today it will add support to its Office productivity suite for many universal standards outside of its own.
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will support the Open Document Format (ODF) by Open Office and various other third party tools along with similar universal document types such as PDF.
The upgrade, expected during the first half of 2009, will allow users to create and open files in the different formats without a plug-in or outside utility to convert the formats.
Office XP and Office 2003 owners will receive continued help through a SourceForge project that translates between Microsoft’s Open XML formats and ODF. To date, no mention has been made as to whether Office for Mac2008 will also receive ODF support.
Once the service pack is installed on a computer running Office 2007, it will allow the user to save documents as an ODF, PDF and XPS, just as they would any of the current supported file formats located in Office. Users can also set ODF as the default file format. Right now, there are separate plug-ins that allow the user to accomplish this for ODF and for PDF and XPS, respectively.
Microsoft created its own XML-based file format OOXML (Office Open XML) for Office 2007. The newest version of its productivity suite was released in late 2007. A heated rivalry was set into motion between OOXML and ODF, a standard supported by companies such as Sun Microsystems.
The company said it will not have support for the current ISO specific for OOXML until it releases the next version of Office, code-named “Office 14.” The company has not yet announced a software release date.
Microsoft also announced it is joining the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next ODF version, to promote future developments of the specification.
Source: PC World
photo credit: robertnelson
Popularity: 2% [?]
No related posts.
Get the blog sent to your inbox by entering your email address:
