Office support for document format standards

Open XML, ODF, PDF, and XPS in Office

Matusow's Blog — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:10:29 GMT

Clearly the Press Announcement today from Microsoft will bring about another wave of discourse on the

OpenXML & ODF was never a zero-sum game

Notes2Self.net — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:19:45 GMT

I've lost count of how many times I've said this , and how many times when I've been told that Microsoft

re: Office support for document format standards

orcmid — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:59:41 GMT

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.

re: Office support for document format standards

mat — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:23:55 GMT

Is there any chance, that the Mac Office Vesion will get ODF support too?

re: Office support for document format standards

John Head — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:38:27 GMT

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? :-)

Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 to provide native support for ODF and PDF document format standards

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:08:54 GMT

A picture is worth a thousand words. :-) Congrats to our friends in the Office client product groups

XPS and the Office Interoperability Announcement

Adrian Ford on XPS et cetera — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:54:19 GMT

Earlier today, the Office team announced that Microsoft will expand the range of formats supported in

Microsoft Announces Support for more document format Standards, including ODF

Eric White's Blog — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:13:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced support for more document format standards, including ODF, PDF, and XPS. Doug

ODF support in Office

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:06:20 GMT

I took a few weeks off recently, which is why my blog has been fairly inactive the past month. I wanted

Microsoft and ODF

Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:05:13 GMT

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

re: Office support for document format standards

W^L+ — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:52:35 GMT

Great news, Doug. In the mean time, is there any chance of getting rid of the annoying warning when using Sun's plugin?

re: Office support for document format standards

Wayne — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:05:04 GMT

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.

ODF în Office 2007 SP2

Weblogul lui Zoli — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:56:07 GMT

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

A 'mooh' Point — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:00:03 GMT

No reason anymore to mandate anything but ODF

re: Office support for document format standards

marc — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:40:28 GMT

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

re: Office support for document format standards

Uwe Brauer — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:35:41 GMT

Hello

it is not entirely clear to me, but does this mean Office will

also support *opening* ODF files?

re: Office support for document format standards

aristippus — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:32:45 GMT

Great news Doug.

I missed this yesterday, as I was watching the Manchester United vs Chelsea Champions League final, so haven't had chance to read the all the other reactions.

I hope this does not become another case of "no good deed goes unpunished", where this is spun into some kind of dark strategy where any bona fide bug in this functionality is seen as some kind of insidious plot to undermine it.

The razors of Occam and Hanlon/Heinlein seem to be seldom used in these parts.

I was faintly amused by the "ODF gas pedal just got slammed to the floor" quote from Bob Sutor, since we just completed the annual survey of our user base regarding what new features we should be putting in our products.

Not surprisingly, there was only a single request for ODF. This was the same customer that requested it over two years ago.

Now I admit, we have a very Excel-centric user base, but since almost every company in the Fortune 500 uses our product somewhere to get data into their spreadsheet of choice, ODF still has some way to go before being a feature we can burn development time on.

Maybe we can leverage Office 2007 or the surrounding translator technologies to import and export it for us "on the cheap"!

A great achievement in moving forward and cementing Microsoft's commitment to standards by deeds, and hopefully there will be a less combative atmosphere with the ODF guys in future.

I am now awaiting the (inevitable?) news of Symphony's support for the Open XML standard, or did I miss it watching football? (Soccer).

Gareth

re: Office support for document format standards

richlv — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:07:40 GMT

minor typo - Ubunto -> Ubuntu

well, and to be pedantic, it's SUSE (all caps) for some time now ;)

re: Office support for document format standards

dmahugh — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:07:13 GMT

Yes, Uwe, Office will support opening and saving ODF files. The PDF/XPS support is save-only, because those are fixed-layout publishing formats.

Gareth, I'm awaiting that news too!

richlv, thanks for the corrections, which I've made above.

More on yesterday’s ODF announcement

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:04:02 GMT

Gray Knowlton had a great post yesterday laying out more of the details on the "Save as ODF" functionality

[Open XML] Les formats ODF et PDF en natif dans Office 2007 ! La version ISO d'Open XML dans Office 14 !

Julien Chable — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:38:12 GMT

Vous en rêviez, Microsoft l'a fait ! Pour une fois, je pense que l’on n’est pas loin de la vérité, à

One more step in the right direction, native ODF support in Office 2007 SP2

Pranav ... Blogging — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:07:13 GMT

Did’ya see dat! I am pretty exited about these developments , As soon as these this is out I want to

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will support more file formats

beqiraj.net — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:14:36 GMT

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will support more file formats

re: Office support for document format standards

Andre — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:51:55 GMT

"The company said the next edition of Office—Office 2007, now expected early next year—will include menu options for XML, ODF and Adobe Systems’ PDF formats. The ODF support would include Office’s three main formats, namely Word, Excel and PowerPoint."

IDG, 6 Jul, 2006 Steven Schwankert

;-)

re: Office support for document format standards

Luc Bollen — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:56:40 GMT

Doug, when you said "Microsoft would not implement the *final* ISO version of OOXML until Office 14 ships", does that mean that Microsoft will not tweak Office 2007 at all in SP2 to support the changes introduced by the BRM in OOXML *Transitional* ?

I'm surprised that you used the word *final*, rather than being specific about *Transitional* and *Strict* versions of ISO OOXML. This introduced some ambiguity and confusion, and some bloggers even commented that Microsoft is simply dropping long term commitment to OOXML.

Could you please be more specific about the planned support of ISO OOXML Transitional and ISO OOXML Strict in both Office 2007 SP2 and Office 14 ?

Several bloggers also commented that the final ISO OOXML text is still crippled with inaccuracies and problems (e.g. http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/fractured-yearfrac-and-discounted-disc.html), and that serious maintenance is needed before the text can be correctly implemented. Does this played a role is Microsoft decision to postpone implementation of the "final ISO version of OOXML" until Office 14 ?

re: Office support for document format standards

Luc Bollen — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:52:36 GMT

Doug, any information to share with us about

- the planned support of ISO OOXML Transitional and ISO OOXML Strict in both Office 2007 SP2 and Office 14 ?

- the possible impact of ISO OOXML text inaccuracies and problems on Microsoft decision to postpone implementation ?

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will support more file formats

beqiraj.net — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:43:18 GMT

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will support more file formats

Working with ODF in Word 2007 SP2

Doug Mahugh — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:02:49 GMT

For those of us on the Office Interoperability team, as well as our colleagues throughout Office, today