Guiding Principles for Office’s ODF Implementation

I’ve linked this from an earlier post, but it probably worth highlighting.

Following on from one of the sessions that took place as part of the DII workshop on ODF and Office SP2 in Redmond Doug Mahugh has written up what was described as the guiding principles for the ODF implementation in Microsoft Office.

This blog post covers the main presentation from our ODF workshop that took place in Redmond last week: Peter Amstein’s explanation of the guiding principles behind our support of ODF in Office 2007 SP2. I’ve added explanations of some of the details that were covered verbally in the workshop, but if anything’s not clear here, please let me know.

Why ODF 1.1?

We’re implementing ODF 1.1 in our initial release of ODF support. We chose this version because it is the most current approved ODF specification, and because it is the version of ODF that current release versions of most other applications such as OpenOffice also support. We will support ODF in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, using the file extensions .odt, .ods, and .odp. The exact release date for Office 2007 SP2 has not been announced yet, but we expect ODF support to be available sometime in the first half of 2009.

Guiding Principles

As we set out to build in support for ODF, we developed a set of principles to guide our implementation team. Those principles are:

• Adhere to the ODF 1.1 Standard
• Be Predictable
• Preserve User Intent
• Preserve Editability
• Preserve Visual Fidelity

The conversation was a fascinating part of the day where the development leads talked through the complex set of decisions that they have had to make as they build ODF support into the products.

I would encourage anybody interested in this topic to read Doug’s whole post…