chrisbray.co.uk

In light of a recent post by Rob Weir on the woeful inadequacies of Microsoft Excel 2007's financial functions I thought this might make interesting reading...

Microsoft have formally announced that Office 2007 SP2 will be updated to support ODF 1.1, and NOT OOXML! Office will also be updated to include support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A and Microsoft's own XML Paper Standard (XPS) which is currently being prepared to be presented to the standardisation boards.

This move has been treated with trepidation by some ODF advocates and we do need to wait until early 2009 to see what Microsoft will actually do, but I firmly believe it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Hopefully this will mean that they have recognised the multitude of mistakes they made with OOXML and that ODF is a much more suitable format, and with their joining the standards boards and a continued promise of interoperability we can only hope this is the first step of many!

Watch this space I guess!