MS Office to Support (Some) Open Standards
Posted Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:15 pm by Tim (36 posts)
This post may not be about the Web or Non-profits specifically, but there isn’t a project or task in our day that doesn’t involve Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. So here it is.
Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 2 update to Microsoft Office 2007 will include support for the ODF document format used natively by OpenOffice (free) and StarOffice (very affordable). Equally exciting is the news that users of Office 2007 will also be able to author PDF 1.5 and PDF/A documents without the need for an additional plugin such as Acrobat.
As a user of OpenOffice at home, I am already able to work easily with MS Word and Excel files while retaining all (or nearly all) of the form and function of the originals and preserve their native .doc and .xls formats. I’m just hoping that MS Office’s support for the open format will increase confidence to the point where more companies and organizations will feel secure enough to move to one of the free office solutions entirely. You sure can save a lot of money with free software, and OpenOffice is looking better all the time.
While this is likely good news, the announcement was also met with a healthy dose of skeptecism.
