If you're an Office 2007 user, the image above probably looks pretty familiar. But look close, and you'll see some Save-As options you've not seen before here: OpenDocument, and (unless you have the existing add-in) PDF & XPS.
This is a screen shot of a pre-release copy of SP2 (Service Pack 2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, showing the new document format standards that we'll be supporting starting with SP2. We've made an announcement of this and several related things today, and you can get all the details in the press release, and watch for additional perspective that will be provided by Gray Knowlton and Jason Matusow on their blogs today. I'll provide a few details here on our technical goals in implementing ODF, the planned user experience, and a few aspects that I think will be of particular interest to developers.
It's exciting to be announcing built-in support for these standards, but I think it's worth noting that this isn't a new direction for Office, but rather the continuation of a long tradition of adding support for additional formats. Office supports a variety of document formats, including the legacy binary formats, the Office Open XML formats, HTML, RTF, text, and many others. Support for multiple document formats provides many benefits to Office users, including the ability to choose the format that best meets each customer’s needs, whether those needs are interoperability, archiving, performance, or standards support. The addition of built-in ODF, PDF and XPS support are logical steps to address the evolving needs of Office users.
ODF, PDF and XPS as built-in file formats. We're making these new formats work just like the other formats Office supports, in a seamless and integrated fashion. When you click the Save As Type dropdown, for instance, you'll see a list which includes ODT, PDF and XPS in the same list where you'll find DOCX, DOC, and many other formats.
And of course users can set ODF to be the default format if they wish, the same way they would for other Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats.
What about the SourceForge translator projects? Microsoft has helped launch open-source translators on SourceForge that can be used for translating between Open XML formats and ODF, UOF or DAISY XML formats. We will continue to invest in these projects, because they enable scenarios that our built-in ODF support in Office doesn't address.
For example, the XSLTs from the SourceForge translator projects can be used by developers working on any platform, in any language. This provides many benefits:
Third-party translators. We anticipate that some developers may want to take over the default ODF load and save paths, so that they can plug in their own translators for ODF, and we'll be providing an API in SP2 that enables this scenario. This means that if a developer disagrees with the details of our approach and would like to implement ODF for Office in a different way, they're free to do so and can set it up such that when a user opens an ODT attached to an email or from their desktop, it will be loaded through their ODF code path.
That's a first look at what we're planning for ODF support in Office, and of course we'll have much more to say as we get closer to the release of SP2. In the meantime, I'm very interested in what other developers and implementers feel is most important in our support of ODF and other standards. How can we work together to improve document format interoperability for the Microsoft Office system? What can we do better?
Clearly the Press Announcement today from Microsoft will bring about another wave of discourse on the
I've lost count of how many times I've said this , and how many times when I've been told that Microsoft
I learned about this through a comment-notification e-mail from a European blog. I rushed to my feed reader to get the latest news, and there are a raft of reports on this announcement.
Even before I saw your post, I noticed I couldn't stop from grinning. I think this is great news. There's a tremendous amount to be learned here, and I am happy to see the prospect for greater community around open format standards and implementations.
Good job! Congratulations. And color me grinning.
Is there any chance, that the Mac Office Vesion will get ODF support too?
Great news Doug, and glad to be part of the press release. That was me speaking, not some marketing-crafted quote folks. I truly believe this is what is best for the customer. With all the the bickering of the ODF vs OOXML battle, I think many forgot who we are all working for.
Now, get OOXML updated ASAP, ok? :-)
A picture is worth a thousand words. :-) Congrats to our friends in the Office client product groups
Earlier today, the Office team announced that Microsoft will expand the range of formats supported in
Today, Microsoft announced support for more document format standards, including ODF, PDF, and XPS. Doug
I took a few weeks off recently, which is why my blog has been fairly inactive the past month. I wanted
Interesting commentary from Microsoft's Jason Matusow and Doug Mahugh, and IBM's Bob Sutor on today's announcement that Microsoft will support read/write to ODF 1.1 in Office 2007 SP2. Jason writes: "For years, I have vocally disagreed with the notion
Great news, Doug. In the mean time, is there any chance of getting rid of the annoying warning when using Sun's plugin?
What can you do better? Optimize the damned thing. Office keeps getting slower and slower. Yes, computers have gotten faster (my first computer was a Timex Sinclair with 2K of RAM) but Office 2003 (we aren't upgrading until Windows 7 comes out) takes a long time to open. I did a comparison against an old laptop (P233 Toshiba running NT and 128 Megs of ram) and it's way faster than my year old desktop with 2 gigs and an AMD64 something or other chip.
As a programmer myself, I can think of half a dozen things you could do to fix this. Considering your manpower, you should be able to do this easily.
Formatele de documente ODF 1.1 (utilizate în OpenOffice sau Symphony) vor fi suportate (read-write) în
No reason anymore to mandate anything but ODF
Good news, Brian
Congratulations. I hope that this be a sincerely effort toward openness and fair competition , and not just a "hey, guys [brian to office developers], just put a new icon in the save as dialog and call the Clever Age stuff when some clicks on it" ... but a really *native* support aimed to achieve fidelity and interoperability in office documents formats ( the ODF TC guys are working toward test cases , reference implementations , etc, so, keep in touch there :-).
But for now, again, congratulations