Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 6th May 2006 22:05 UTC
A group of software developers have created a program to make Microsoft Office work with files in the OpenDocument format, a move that would bridge currently incompatible desktop applications. Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice.org project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw.
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Member since:
2005-08-22
"ODF should only be used ion Office suites that use it natively."
No office suite supports odf "natively." That implies, at least traditionally, that odf is a memory dump, like .doc files are. It isn't. It's based on xml and is simply a format that is well documented so that other programs can read and write to it.
Memory dump files are fine when you are only using the program that created it. ex: MS Word for .doc files. Those file formats are not so good when you want to do other stuff with them, like have other programs (email, calendars) open and edit them. That's why MS had to develop their own xml. It wasn't for the fun of it. I think you are confusing supporting a file natively with supporting a file as a default format. Only the latter applies to odf.