Release 1.0 now available!

ODF Converter Team Blog

By OllieD, on Friday 2 February 2007 at 08:38 :: General :: #17 :: rss

As you might have noticed, the long awaited Release 1.0 is now available for download!

It has been 8 months since the project started in early June and we've been hard working all that time to ensure the add-In meets a high quality level. It has been tested over Word XP, Word 2003 and Word 2007 in five different languages (English, Dutch, French, German and Polish) thanks to DIaLOGIKa (http://www.dialogika.de/) and Aztecsoft (http://www.aztecsoft.com/).

Since the official announcement from Microsoft (see the press news), over 9000 of copies were downloaded on SourceForge.org (at the time of posting this entry)! This is a great pleasure for us to see that the add-In has reached such an enormous success.

Already, we have received quite a lot of press coverage. A hit in Google for ODF-Converter returns 871 000 results! We are proud to bring life to a project that has stirred a big crowd, sometimes positively sometimes not, as the whole open standard issue seem to have become a political controversy...

Nonetheless, we sincerely hope this Add-in will benefit the entire community in exchanging electronic documentation. Yes, exchanging documents won't be chore any more. Yes you will be able to read and write ODF documents even if you don't have openOffice suite (or other ODF implementations). And conversely, as Novell (http://www.novell.com/) has announced that the Translator will be natively implemented in its next version of OpenOffice.

But we won't stop here.... We'are also planning to work on Excel and Powerpoint and this should be availble by the end of the year (Novembre 2007), so stay tuned and keep on providing feedback as this will help us in future development!

Thanks all for participating in this exciting project! I'm looking forward to the next releases... ;)

Trackbacks

1. On Friday 2 February 2007, at 19:45, by OpenXML Developer

Open XML Translator enables interoperability with ODF

Microsoft announced yesterday that the Open XML Translator project has released version 1.0. As it says...

2. On Friday 2 February 2007, at 20:12, by Doug Mahugh

Open XML Translator 1.0 available

Version 1.0 of the Open XML translator project is now available on SourceForge. Here are links for the

3. On Saturday 3 February 2007, at 01:13, by neuhawk

Open XML Translator 1.0 available Open XML

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/02/02/open-xml-translator-1-0-available.aspx ...

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Comments

1. On Friday 2 February 2007 at 20:17, by orcmid

Congratulations. It is heartwarming to see a professional job achieve a major milestone. Keep it coming!

You provide a great return to reality from the delerious babble that abuses the name of a Renaissance genius. (I must stop letting myself become cranky over that garbage.)

Thank you. I am going to try it out right away, along with my fresh Office 2007 Ultimate setup.

2. On Friday 2 February 2007 at 21:41, by David Horat

Congratulations. It seems a good work and it is always very good to see how standards get wider. By the way, where can I find the SXW importer from Clever Age? I can´t find it. Thanks.

3. On Friday 2 February 2007 at 23:43, by Gary Gilchrist

This is awesome news. Congratulations. We have been following the translator and it is of very high quality and the results are quite impressive.

4. On Sunday 4 February 2007 at 00:16, by President Hu

Nihao from mainland China!

Microsoft needs to open it's source code, so that everyone can build upon innovation, that allows individuals and society to exchange their data regardless of whom introduced whatever.

The whole intellectual property rights situation is flawed, because all prior innovation always is built upon, whereas in the US, it's no longer why every company uses IPR to protect and eliminate their competitors with patents, copyright, and trademarks.

The US cannot innovate having every idea, innovation and method patented to a monopoly that locks you in, by locking you out.

When will Americans understand their own system that is doomed? Capitalism was never about sustainability, harmony and equality.

Even present day Communist China is developing more, rising as a superpower, while the US waste billions of dollars fighting in Iraq. What does the US gain for this investment? Protected oil shipments?

Microsoft's isn't ever going to provide the public with open source formats, that allow everyone to build upon and exchange their innovation. ODF isn't enough here.

Linux should be replacing Windows, allowing everyone to communicate, innovate on a cheaper platform, that doesn't require all new hardware, with a huge investment into DRM. Yes, Vista is nothing but Microsoft's DRM version, trying to set itself up as the new digital content distributor, using it's closed source code formats, protected by DRM.

ODF isn't goning to do enough to keep culture freely available to all. It's sad because this culture cannot even share, it's own heritage among it's own citizens.

Bill Gates doesn't need to earn another 50 billion dollars this year, while millions of Americans go without, in need of innovation, technologies to build upon.

You see that is the difference between China, and the US. China gets to develop into a world leader, a superpower, basically from almost nothing, and what's funny, them Americans paid for it all, by investing their own capital into China, so we could earn a profit by selling cheap labor products back to them. Is it any wonder why the US is in a trade debt with China and many other countries?

It will not be long when China is able to develop it's own innovation, which you can be sure we will not give it away to earn a dollar or was that "buck" for you Americans?

Also, a bit off track, but the rest of the world is learning English, and yet in the US, you Americans don't even have a national accept language, so your government supports Spanish, and you wonder why so many of you cannot even communicate.

China has already begin to make everyone learn the same language, just as Germany did not long ago.

China is with it's many problems too, but the whole point of this here discussion was to point out the root cause rather than the issue of having to add-in ODF into the world's biggest data processing platform.

Microsoft doesn't want you to understand their policies, to which they prevent everyone from building upon. If any other company could replace Microsoft applications, they view that as an enemy rather than moving forward.

ODF is just a small step towards openness, which Microsoft takes even bigger steps to prevent.

When was the last time anyone used Ofice 2007, and paid attention, that is to see how all them new document formats such as XML are not open formats at all!

So this now becomes the job of a few to translate every new Microsoft format, which as I see isn't complete and or functional at least to the degree of the application to be without additional complexity.

Why cannot this ODF be built in to begin with, giving choice a chance, rather than as a Communist Party only decision right?

Yeah, that's one of our issues, and most of us admit this, and will find a way ahead to deal with it. But the US is so beaucratic they will be locked into a failed system unable to make changes until everyone is suing everyone else, and in debt!

China will not need to do anything to conquer here, other than to just let more time go by, as President Bush continues his endless spending spree on Iraq.

The cost of oil from Iraq was cheaper before the war, so now the US must pay even more for this oil.

What is better because of your Bush?

More Americans dead? More Chaos in Iraq? Higher cost of oil? Don't forget your Bush is asking your Congress for another 314 billion dollars more (2207-2008) for his vision...

All this dos is unit more terrorist to resist Bush, because of the occupation in Iraq. The middle east isn't going to thank Bush, and welcome the US to control their homelands... their religion and certainly their oil economy.

Truthfully, all the world's nations need to address global warming, even us coal industries of China...

The only solution is to cooperate and get along, as if we all continue to claim each other has the right, such as to pollute, then the entire whole world will change because of more pollution, and everyone will need to cope with this effect. Are you ready and prepared? Does that seem really wise?

Since humanity is responsible for global warming, shouldn't humanity also be responsible for getting along, and learning to overcome and work together, rather than to build up for a rainy day of war ahead?

Read our Sunzi "Sun Wu" military teacher manual, as in truth if the world wants to evolve, it cannot continue to hold on to it's past ideologies.

ODF isn't a solution, it's a fix for just ODF only. We need a solution, and the only one that works is to not lock everyone into a monopoly which Microsoft is all about.

Thank you for your time...

5. On Sunday 4 February 2007 at 03:55, by Luke

Cool, thanks a bunch for this great tool!

6. On Monday 5 February 2007 at 08:10, by Karl

How about Word 2000, which is STANDARD at my workplace? (Nobody I know ever used Word XP/2003/2007)

7. On Monday 5 February 2007 at 09:13, by freechelmi

Sorry I just tried the plugin.

It works roughly only for documents without images, I don't see why it's a 1.0 BTW .

The worst thing is: this is just a converter !

You cannot even open odt files with WORD from your explorer !

This is ridiculous , it's a kind of :
" We are MS , look, we support ODF, you can import and export Text-only documents in recent version of Word, so French administration don't have to switch to OOo ! Keep on Banking with Office 2007 "

I hope everybody will stay away from office 2007, not beacause it's crap , but because it's again the WorldWide holdup from mono^polist MS...

Even when they make a plugin, You can see it ...

8. On Thursday 8 February 2007 at 06:02, by rose water

This is awesome! Too bad microsoft is still focusing on presentation-based formats as opposed to semantic.

9. On Friday 9 February 2007 at 11:08, by tatle

Support for Microsoft Office 2004 (Mac) missing. Anyone working on a Mac version?

10. On Wednesday 14 February 2007 at 19:55, by Koo

Installation was everything else than easy, as it required .NET 2.0 to be installed first, this is a download of 20+ megabytes... Overbloated and useless stuff... Why?

ODF Translation was slow... slow... slow... and not always reliable, many things looked different after translating.

Not particularly excited - let's see how the ODF translator from Sun will do... Competition is always a good thing... ;-)))

11. On Thursday 22 February 2007 at 18:58, by Zirneklitis

Converter for MS Office 97 and MS Office 2000 is welcomed. A lot of people are using these versions and are not going to make upgrade to newer ones.

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ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word