Grab the ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office early
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will officially add support for the Open Document Format ODF which is a free and open file format for electronic office documents. The format is already implemented in Open Office and users of Microsoft Office 2007 who want their product to be compatible can download the ODF plugin for Microsoft Office at Sun.
The current release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is scheduled for the first half of 2009 which means that it will take about a year before Microsoft is adding the support officially. Common Open Document File extensions are .oft for word processing, .ods for spreadhsheets, .odp for presentations and .odg for graphics.
The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Office 2007 the ability to load, save and edit odf files. The plugin is also compatible to previous editions of Microsoft Office including Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2000. The plugin integrates itself seamlessly into the Save and Load file dialogs and is translated into several languages including English, German, French, Spanish and a dozen more.
Update: The ODF Plugin is no longer available on the Sun or Oracle website.
Update 2: An Open XML / ODF Translator add-in has been released and is now available on the Sourceforge website.
The converter is based on XSL transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing to manage the packaging (zip / unzip), schema incompatibilities and the integration into Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We chose to use an Open Source development model that allows developers from all around the world to participate and contribute to the project.
The program is compatible with Office XP, 2003 and 2007 only and not with newer versions of Microsoft Office.
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You reminded me about one notable event ;) On Monday I translated document from English to Russian via OpenOffice and OmegaT.
OmegaT is a translation program, which helps translator do his/her work. Main advantage of it for me is displaying original and translated text – so one can with ease review and correct or improve one’s translation, what isn’t that possible in ordinary text editors and word processors. It can use translation memories, glossaries etc. – like serious translation tools do. However, in contrast to very expensive and bloated commercial translation tools, OmegaT is 1) free 2) slim 3) written in Java, so cross-platform 4) pretty simple. And it accepts .odt format (they say, OOXML too).
So, when I received Word document, I opened it in OpenOffice Writer, converted to .odt, opened by OmegaT, translated, then converted to Word back – and all the formatting and pictures remain in place.
Isn’t this great? :)
I’ve never seen a document with an ODF extension.
Well because ODF is not an extension in itself. It is a collective name for the following extensions:
.odt
.ods
.odp
.odg
and another one I can’t recall.
Secondly, ODF is being used mostly by Government Agencies, NGOs, Non-Profits, and other archived-concerned and “compatibility” concerned and ISO-followers.
ODF is an ISO Standard. Only Microsoft’s Office product line-up doesn’t follow an ISO Standard. Now they’re being forced to because they are losing customers by the thousands worldwide.