David Flynn26 May 2008, 12:00 PM
Two years after its launch, Office 2007 will finally get native support for the XML-based Open Document Format as well as PDF output.
Coincidence is a wonderful thing.
Mere days after the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, sledging the software colossus because Office 2007 lacks inbuilt support for open standards such as the Open Document Format, Microsoft announced that – well, take a guess. Go on.
Did a Microsoft exec
a) throw a few chairs around tell and then Becta to take a flying jump
b) decree the default document format would in future be TXT
c) suddenly announce support for ODF because they’ve been listening to their customers, and anyway they were going to do it all along but just hadn’t gotten around to sending out the press release?
You picked (c)? Damn but you’re clever. There’s probably a job opening for you in Redmond.
Yes, up popped Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s general manager of Interoperability and Standards, to proclaim that as of next year’s Service Pack 2 release, Office 2007 would add ODF to the menu – indeed, quite literally to the File Open and File Save As menus. “We have heard from customers and governments that they would like to see us do this. Now is the time to announce this support.”
And as luck would have it, because Microsoft has an “ongoing dialogue with the EC we will absolutely have a discussion with them about these steps and get whatever feedback they may have on it,” Robertson said.
Microsoft also decided to put on its best party dress and join the ODF parade, with Robertson stressing that “It's also important to announce this now because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF.”
And gosh, suddenly out came a press release trumpeting that Microsoft will “offer customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite”.
Microsoft has already released a converter which allows Word users to work with ODF documents. But SP2, due in the first half of 2009, will build this into Office and be available across the suite’s core applications so that Office 2007 documents can be opened from and saved into ODT (text), ODS (spreadsheet) and ODP (presentation) formats. Users will also be able to set these as the default file formats for Office 2007.
SP2 will also integrate the current add-ins that allow Office 2007 documents to be saved as PDF and XPS files, and Microsoft has said it “collaborate with the open source community” to provide ODF support for Office 2000, 2003 and XP.
There’s a lot more ODF love coming from Microsoft. The company will join the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) technical committee which is now drafting the next version of ODF, take part in new working groups devoted to ‘ODF maintenance’ and improving interoperability between Microsoft’s own Open XML format and other ISO-recognised document formats, and ramp up its activity behind Office 2007’s support for China’s own Uniform Office Format national document standard. Oh, and they’ll also print lots of t-shirts.
Finally, Microsoft said that ODF and PDF would stay baked into the Office codebase in order to be natively supported in the next version of Office which is currently codenamed ‘Office 14’ and expected to arrive in late 2009.