July 6th, 2006
Microsoft sponsors Office-ODF translator
Is Microsoft cozying up to OpenDoc after all? Microsoft is now sponsoring an open source project to convert Office docs to OpenDocument format, News.com reports.
Microsoft today launched the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net. The software will be available under the BSD open-source license.
Microsoft isn’t seeing a sharp uptick in demand for OpenDocument, but government customers urged the company to provide interoperability between Microsoft’s own forthcoming XML Office formats and OpenDocument, said Tom Robertson, the general manager of interoperability and standards at the software giant.
"We’re hearing that (customers) don’t want homogeneity–they want diversity; they want translatability," Robertson said. "And some customers are saying they would like us to focus on this to a certain extent, to make sure the product is high quality."
Today, the software site has an ODF add-in for Word 2007 that converts both ways between Word and ODF format. The goal is to have a Word plug-in for Office 2007 by the end of this year and translators for Excel and PowerPoint next year, said Jean Paoli, the general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft. The conversions will be based on Microsoft’s Open Office XML, which is backwards compatible, so it will work with older versions of Office. Users won’t find the translation perfect, though.
"We wanted to have this project be really transparent," Paoli said. "No translation is perfect. There are a lot of trade-offs between Open XML, which is actually full-featured and backward-compatible, and ODF, which is more limited."
Another translater from OpenDocument Foundation, is expected to be tested by Massachusetts.
