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Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

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There is some great news coming out of Redmond today around some of the feature improvements being delivered via Office 2007 Service Pack 2, scheduled for the first half of 2009. Service Pack 2 will incorporate document support for

  • XML Paper Specification (XPS)
  • Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A
  • Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1

What does this mean?

Well it means that when uses create documents in Microsoft Office 2007, they can save it in to any of the formats natively (without having to install third-party updates).

Now of course some people will say what about the recently approved OpenXML standard? Well much of that standard is already supported in Office 2007 today, but we will see the full implementation of OpenXML in the next version of Office code named "Office 14"

Then in addition to all of this goodness, Microsoft is also committed to providing the ability to open, edit and save documents in the Uniform Office Format (UOF), which is the Chinese national document format.

There is always going to be a lot of sensationalism about Microsoft supporting ODF, especially when OpenXML has just been approved, but that is not the way to look at this announcement. Lets be clear, I don't see this as being all about ODF and OpenXML, in fact there are three other standards being supported here in addition to ODF. This is Microsoft, being a responsible company, listening to the customer, understanding their needs, and working to deliver a solution that delivers the greatest choice.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2008
    I feel completely cheated by the purchase of a current shipping modern Microsoft product i.e. Office 2007. I hate Microsoft for not supporting ISO 29500 in Office 2007 and making us upgrade to a newer version of Office. I sincerely wish there will an overwhelming outcry now regarding this and Microsoft will reconsider its decision.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2008
    One of the things you need to understand is that while implementing support for a new file format such as ODF is substantial work, changes to existing formats can often be more complex because we need to maintain backwards compatability between the two formats. Also you should consider this about your purchase of Office 2007, while having a document standard incorporated is important, was it your primary driver for acquisition. Consider the other benefits that you get from using Office 2007... productivity improvements, creativtiy enhancements. Consider the different ways that you can utilize Office in your workplace today, you can use Office as a front end to your business applications like SAP, Siebel, in fact almost anything because Office can be used as a development platform. You can use Excel for instance as an analytical tool against databases. I have built these myself for analysts to monitor pricing in the market every 5 seconds, it was really cool, and I did that in Excel 95!!! There are so many other reasons why you would buy Office 2007 besides a document standard, and I would encourage you to consider the time savings and productivity enhancements you get out of using the product to deliver value back from your purchase.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2008
    I feel completely cheated by the purchase of a current shipping modern Microsoft product i.e. Office 2007. I hate Microsoft for not supporting ISO 29500 in Office 2007 and making us upgrade to a newer version of Office. I sincerely wish there will an overwhelming outcry now regarding this and Microsoft will reconsider its decision.