Microsoft is finally adding support for ODF (OpenDocument Format for Office Applications) and Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) to its Office productivity suite, the company announced on Wednesday.
Support for ODF and PDF will be included in the software through Microsoft Office Service Pack 2, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, according to Microsoft.
Specifically, the service pack will add file-format support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A and ODF v1.1, as well as XPS (XML Paper Specification). XPS is a similar format to PDF created by Microsoft to rival Adobe’s popular document-exchange file format. PDF 1.5 is a specification created and maintained by Adobe, while PDF/A is the current version of the standard PDF specification maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Once the service pack is available and installed on a PC running Office 2007, it will allow users to save documents as ODF, PDF and XPS just as they would any of the current supported file formats in Office. They also can set ODF as the default file format if they so choose. Currently, there are separate plug-ins that allow users to do this now for ODF, and for PDF and XPS, respectively.