news.com.com — Microsoft soon plans to release a converter that will let Word users open documents saved in the OpenDocument format. The Word plug-in is the 1st installment of MS's plan to add support for the OpenDocument, or ODF, standard which has gained interest from government customers. This is the same format that MS fought in Mass. earlier this year.
Oct 13, 2006 View in Crawl 4
pyro108Oct 14, 2006
No, the macintosh version is not getting any more updates from anything Micro$oft. No more word, no more IE and no more Office. (Thank god.) A Very stupid mistake on M$'s part.
airniqueelOct 14, 2006
I use ODF file formats all the time. I find that they take up smaller amount of memory on my hard disk. Yea, the disadvantage is that most of the people who I need to send documents to use Word's .doc format. But that's not a problem since .pdf is pretty ubiquitous as well.
digeratiprimeOct 14, 2006
THIS "digg down" CRAP IS GETTING OLD.
mlivingOct 14, 2006
Please MS could care less about ODF and really everyone should have the same feeling about document standards as well.... Until you have to pay for a program to access your tax records, or social security information or your medical records.Now the MS fanboys boys will start yippin' about free readers this and that but MS is rolling everything into their OS as fast as possible and eventually all the FREE stuff will come with the $300 operating system!The ODF and ISO committee have already told MS to take a leap with the bulls**t half-ass plugin that does nothing to extend the ODF standard.What most users don't understand is that MS doesn't want open standards because then people don't need their over-bloated bulls**t word processor. Anyone with an open document capable word processing package can open and save any open document. No MS required.And that is the ONLY reason MS is pulling their tried and true, extend, embrace and extinct tactics with ODF... but the world is a different place now then it was 5 or so years ago and more and more users and businesses are realizing the huge savings and flexibility open standards afford. OPEN STANDARDS not just open documents.Open infrastructure, open standards, open documents... non-proprietary files that let the user chose the application to work with them on. Not the document deciding for them. Big difference!Besides... within the next year or two there is going to be a home version of Google Writely and then MS will be in complete and utter fits and chair flinging! :)
i440Oct 14, 2006
“What most users don't understand is that MS doesn't want open standards because then people don't need their over-bloated ***** word processor.”Right. I prefer OpenOffice for the same reason.To celebrate, I believe we should all launch the program. While the three-hour loading process takes place, we can always make additional futile attempts to configure software on Linux.
geronimoOct 14, 2006
it mentions a filter which you must d/l explicitely and now we must rely on MS to incorporate that filter into word. I'll believe it when I see it.And yeah, you should have seen MS when they decided to play nice with standards. They did fun things like fly over janitors and anyone they could find in order to vote for MS standards. Fortunately they were overruled. Liking microsoft is like liking the devil.