News regarding file formats for this week:
- Novell has agreed to produce a translator for Microsoft's Office Open File Format. Apparently, the translation program will go into Novell's branded version of OpenOffice and be submitted back to the OpenOffice.org community for inclusion in the version available for download. Despite Groklaw's negative take on this news, I see this as very promising for OpenOffice. While I would of course prefer to see ODF supported in MS Office, clean conversions of MS Office Open XML can only help the propagation of OpenOffice.
- The Open Document Format is now officially an ISO standard.
- With the release of Office 2007, Mac users may find themselves unable to open Office files they receive from anyone using it. The new XML-based default files are not readable in the latest version of Office for the Mac.
could there be a relationship?
microsoft makes $250 million linux purchase, from Novell no less.
bradley || bleckblog.org
yep
Yep. OO has supported .doc before. Only in the past, it has not been with Microsoft's blessing. I understand the downsides to the whole Novell/MS deal, but once we have complete compatibility between OO and MS in file transfers, that could be the end of MS's dominance over office productivity software.
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Charlie | cyberdash