Opportunity Knocks

Shane Coyle, over at Boycott Novell, has news about an ODF file <–> MSOffice-binary file conversion plugin that does the conversion inside of Microsoft Office, so that Microsoft's own secret sauce handles its binary file formats.  Microsoft has maintained that it needed its OOXML format, because it preserved all of the mistakes of the past.  This plugin once again shows how their new OOXML file format is unnecessary and unwanted.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the da Vinci plugin is that it provides the ability for users to select ODF as the default file format within Office, providing the native support for ODF that Stafford Masie was expecting, and neither Novell nor Microsoft delivered on the promise, but rather it was the OpenDocument foundation.

Shane links to an article on the OpenDocument Foundation's blog, fr0mat.net, where we read:

For our purposes, we are concerned with the fidelity of file conversions between OpenDocument and binary files bound to Microsoft Word versions from Word 97 to Word 2007. Microsoft is able to perfect a full fidelity conversion of those same binary documents to and from EOOXML, using the Microsoft XML compatibility pack plugin. We argue that the same full fidelity of conversion is possible between Microsoft Word and OpenDocument, using the daVinci plugin for Microsoft Word. In fact, the process of how this is done is very similar to that used by the MS XML compatibility pack.

Let's be thankful to the OpenDocument Foundation, developers of this plugin, for this valued tool for those who use Microsoft Office applications in their businesses.