Open Document Format for Office

Open Document Format (ODF) support in the Office suite is the goal of a new Microsoft-funded project. ODF is an XML-based file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics that has been adopted by some governments as a standard for document interchange. The project will help protect Microsoft’s Office and document management business in those markets, while avoiding a full embrace of ODF, which competes with Microsoft’s planned Office XML formats.

The Open XML Translator project will develop Office application plug-ins and command-line utilities for translating between ODF and Microsoft’s Office XML formats, which will be the default save format for Office 2007 and can be retrofitted onto earlier Office versions. The plug-ins will work in Office 2007, while the command-line utilities will support bulk scripted translation, as well as older versions of Office that can’t run the plug-ins. The initial release of the translators (planned for 2006) will only support the Office XML format for Word, but Excel and PowerPoint support should follow in 2007. The translators will be released under Open Source licenses and developed by several Microsoft partners, including Aztecsoft, Clever Age, and Dialogika.