Another win for the good guys in the pursuit of open standards and formats for office documents. Reuters is reporting that Microsoft

will offer free software that will allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats. The translation tools will be developed and licensed as open source software, and will be offered as downloadable add-ins for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, the Redmond, Washington-based company said."

Now let's just hope the release of this software doesn't take as long as Vista. But once it is, everyone can expect that I will be sending out documents in ODF format only. No more .doc files!