Microsoft Office and ODF

When I did my presentation on Open XML File Formats at TechEd someone asked me afterwards something to the effect of "What is the Microsoft stance on ODF".

Without getting into a bitter debate about pros and cons (a subject for better informed people than me) the good news is that you will be able to save to the ODF format from Microsoft Office 2007 - albeit not natively.

Back in July we announced that we had started off a project to provide a converter for the ODF formats.  The converter will be open source, but we'll link to it from inside Microsoft Office.

As Brian Jones puts it in his blog post on the subject:

There will be a menu item in the Office applications that will point people to the downloads for XPS, PDF, and now ODF. So you'll have the ability to save to and open ODF files directly within Office (just like any other format).

For more details, read Brians post.

Interestingly, this has allowed Massachusetts to stick with Microsoft Office.

tags: Office+2007, ODF, Office, Microsoft+Office, OpenXML