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Leopard to Natively Support ODF

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

October 17, 2007, 11:28 AM

OpenDocument took another step away from obscurity Tuesday, as Apple confirmed that Mac OS X version 10.5 -- known as "Leopard" -- will natively support ODF files, alongside Microsoft's Word 2007 formats. Apple had previously added support for the format in its Pages word processing application.

Leopard users will be able to view ODF and Word 2007 documents without an external program; they will open directly in the operating system's TextEdit application. While TextEdit provides only very basic editing capabilities, it will suffice for viewing of most documents. Microsoft supports ODF in Office 2003 and 2007, but only when an external plug-in is installed.

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By LinuxAdmin

edited Oct 21, 2007 - 12:41 PM

Microsoft does not support ODF at all in any version.

Microsoft has (at most) sponsored an open-source project that is getting very little traction and is probably one of the worst ODF converters available.

The Microsoft-sponsored plugin works by translating ODF tags to MS-XML tags, then opening the file as a native MS file format. Support for this plug-in is *NOT* being provided by Microsoft, nor are patches, fixes, or developor documentation.

The ODF plug-ins you are probably referring to are 3rd-party (probably the best one is from SUN), so again it is not correct to say that *Microsoft* supports ODF.

Microsoft has repeatedly refused to open their plug-in specifications to FOSS ODF-plugin developers which has severely hindered the development of all ODF plug-ins for MS Office.

Microsoft's Office 2007 design does not include ways to make plug-in-based file converters work like the native file converters. Consequently, users have to continuously 'import' and 'export' instead of 'file save-as' and often (especially when using the MS-sponsored plugin), ODF files have to be converted to OOXML or MSXML (2007 version) by the plugin before they can be opened in MS Office 2003 or 2007. Because of this last situation, it should be clear that Microsoft does not support ODF at all - just those files that have been translated to a native MS format by a plugin in a seperate pre-processing step. Conversion from MS Office to ODF must also use a post-processing step in the reverse direction.

Score: 0

By zridling

posted Oct 17, 2007 - 10:36 PM

Great news, indeed. Next up: getting Apple's office suite to support ODF natively.

Score: 0

By ZeroEpoch

posted Oct 17, 2007 - 6:43 PM

Microsoft Office 2003 supports ODF with a plugin developed by Sun. The Microsoft plugin is still very beta and is pretty useless compared to the Sun plugin.