MS Offers Open-Source Document Translator

Microsoft has released the final version of an open-source document translator for Microsoft Word that allows users to save files in the rival standard, OpenDocument (ODF) format.

The completed Open XML Translator enables conversion of documents from one format to the other and is available for anyone to download and use at no cost. When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, the Translator offers the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format. The Translator may also be plugged into competing word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML.

The 1.0 release of the Translator supports the current industry-standard document formats of both Open XML and ODF. It has been tested on Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP and has been localized into Dutch, French, German and Polish. In addition, Novell has announced that the Translator will be natively implemented in its next version of OpenOffice.

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Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft said, "We believe in delivering interoperability by design; in this case, by working with partners and members of the open source community we have achieved that goal. The translator project has been built to be independent of any one application, and has proved to be useful for both Microsoft and our competitors in solving an interoperability challenge for customers."

The second phase of the translator project, including translators for Spreadsheet (Microsoft Office Excel) and Presentation (Microsoft Office PowerPoint), will begin in February. Regular customer technology previews will be posted to SourceForge.net beginning in May 2007, and the final versions are scheduled to be available for customers in November 2007.

The Microsoft-funded translator project is being developed by French company CleverAge and Sonata Software Ltd. of India, and tested by Dialogika of Germany and India-based Aztecsoft Ltd. The project will continue to be open source, developed on SourceForge.net and will be freely available to all customers for development or use.

Microsoft Corp. announced its support for the open source project to build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006 to provide interoperability between formats.