Open XML can help you skip school. I've covered in the past how ISVs, corporate developers, information workers, and public-sector decision makers can benefit from Open XML standardization, but my colleague Pranav Wagh has addressed a hitherto-ignored segment of the market with his "Open XML for primary school goers." On a more serious note, Pranav has posted some useful content recently on how to create a PPTX with the packaging API, and then how to merge selected slides into a PPTX.
Interop interviews in Information Week. Information Week has published a recent interview with Sam Ramji (Sr. Director, Platform Strategy) and Tom Robertson (GM, Standards/Interoperability) that covers various aspects of Microsoft's approach to interopability, standards, open source, and related topics.
Lost in translation. Rob Weir posted some performance tests for translation between document formats, prompting Jesper Lund Stocholm to exult "When Rob is right, he's right!" Both posts include interesting thoughts, and have prompted a good discussion of some of the core issues in translating between various document formats. On a related note, Sun announced recently the availability of version 1.2 of the Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office.
Is Jesper on a binge? Speaking of translation, I'm not sure how to interpret Jesper's latest post. It's written in Danish, and the only words I understand are beer and pilsner. Well, "alkoholisk" is a word I might be willing to guess at. Skal!
Doug,
There is really nothing to it. Sometime in september one of the other bloggers in the Danish blog community made a bet that Microsoft would not change a single word in OOXML through the ISO-process. I therefore suggested that we should get together to have a beer and have a face-to-face meeting.
It was largely forgotten in the hectic period in Fall/Winter 2007, so a couple of weeks ago I reposted the suggestion.
The attendance-roster is now an astonishing 5 people - including me. Sadly, one of them said that he wouldn't bring beer but instead tar and feathers.
FYI: It is naturally an international event taken place at the student's bar "Scrollbar" at Copenhagen IT University. If anyone from the international community (or even Sweden or Norway) is in the neighbourhood on June 12th at 17:00, feel free to pop in.
:o)