Here is reminder from Jamie Watson about support for Open XML files in the upcoming release of OpenOffice.org 3.0.
The best news about this release, at least for me personally, is that it can read Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML files (.docx, .xlsx and the like). That is extremely good news – if you need to read Office 2007 documents, this saves you the trouble of either having to run a separate file format converter every time, or having to download and install the Microsoft file converter update for a few previous versions of Office. In fact, if you were desperate enough, or determined enough, you could use OpenOffice 3 as a document format converter, opening the Office 2007 documents and then saving them in one of the many other formats OpenOffice can produce (tip: save them in ODF format, and save yourself a lot of future headaches!).
Last time I checked OpenOffice.org 3.0 only provided support to read Open XML files, with no support for writing them. Sun’s Michael Brauer talked about the read filters that they are developing in a blog post almost a year ago;
However, Microsoft Office 2007 is new. Very new. Someone who has just spent a considerable amount of money for a Microsoft Office 2007 license will not migrate to OpenOffice.org immediately. In addition, not many OOXML documents are already being distributed, probably because users can’t be sure who at the other end can already open OOXML files. Thus, we do not expect high initial demand for OOXML filters. But most likely it will increase over time. And the 6000-page OOXML specification is not implemented at a weekend (and also not in a month, or two, or thee, or six). So it is recommended to start early. That’s what we did.
How far have we got with the development of OOXML filters? First of all, Sun’s OpenOffice.org developers are only working on import filters, that is, filters that read OOXML documents into OpenOffice.org. We are not working on export filters, that is, filters that save OOXML documents. Simple reason is that the both situations I’ve described above only require OOXML import filters. For saving documents, we have ODF. I will come back to ODF later.
I need to do a little more research, my understanding is that this is support for the version of Open XML produced by current versions of Microsoft Office (ECMA-376), not for the updated IS29500 format. I assume, in line with the goal of interoperability with Microsoft Office, that this will change with the release of Office 14 sometime next year.
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