Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 3rd Feb 2007 16:40 UTC, submitted by jayson.knight
A Microsoft-sponsored open-source project is expected on Friday to release a translator that will convert file formats between Microsoft Office and rival standard OpenDocument, or ODF. Microsoft started the project at SourceForge last year, relying on three partners to develop the code that lets a user open and save word processor documents in two different formats.
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Member since:
2005-11-11
Well, you can't do it perfectly yet.
There are at least two solutions that do this imperfectly:
OOXML -> (load) -> OpenOffice memory -> (save as) ODF.
OOXML -> (load) -> Office 2007 memory -> export to ODF using CleverAge converter.
AFAIK the first of those achieves the best result, but I could be mistaken about that. Neither conversion is perfect.
There is promise soon of a better process however:
OOXML -> (load) -> Office 2007 memory -> (save as) ODF using daVinci plugin.
That one should yield a near-perfect conversion. It will also allow you to continue to use all of your existing business processes built around Office and other Microsoft products such as Sharepoint.
So, if you have saved any of your documents in OOXML, then all is not lost and you are not necessarily locked in to Microsoft platforms quite yet. There is still a chance for you to have cross-platform interoperability and ISO standards compliance. All that is required is to shift over to ODF as your document standard format when the daVinci plugin becomes available.