The Outserve Limited Blog

Like many people Outserve looked forward to the support of ODF (Open Document Format) in Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and saw it as an important step forward in improved operability between open source solutions like Openoffice.org and proprietary software like Microsoft Office. This step forward should have meant greater freedom for users and an ease of use when exchanging documents that many had hoped for.

Sadly, this has not been the case and there has been a lot written on the subject ranging from opinions of a poor implementation to accusations of malicious intent on behalf or Microsoft. What is clear is that we are still a long way off usable ODF support in Microsoft Office as standard, no matter what Microsoft’s PR engine would have us believe. To be fair what is also clear is that the situation is not at all clear and there is more to this than meets the eye. This is fantastically explained in a blog post by Rob Weir where he tests ODF interoperability across a whole group of products and explains, in great detail, why it would appear that ODF support is actually getting worse not better.

While we wait yet again for this mess to be sorted out what can we do? Well as mentioned in Rob Weir‘s article there are two plugins for Office 2007 available and both offer better ODF support than Office 2007 on its own. Details of the two plugins are below with the Clever Age plugin appearing better from Rob Weir‘ testing.

OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-ins for Office (Clever Age)

Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office – Get It

I will be testing both of these plugins over the next few weeks and will feedback on this blog with any findings.