Office

Legacy format FUD

January 2, 2008

From CyberTech Rambler (and Slashdot) comes the news that the Office 2003 Service Pack #3 disables (blocks) access to a number of legacy document formats. Details are in this MS support article. Formats so blocked include legacy Lotus 1-2-3 and Corel Quattro Pro formats. Why? According to the Microsoft support article, “By default, these file [...]

17 comments Read the full article →

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

November 27, 2006

Some interesting news, via Bob Sutor. Let’s take a closer look at the what is being offered as part of this “royalty free” deal from Microsoft. At first it appears like an early Christmas present from Microsoft, a royalty-free license to the Office UI for “software vendors who wish to incorporate the 2007 Microsoft Office [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

Genesis 11:5-9

November 14, 2006

This, fresh from from Office Watch: “Office 2007 compatibility pack disappoints”. Update 11/15: Some readers have written with more information. This may be an issue between the pre-1.5-final-draft version of OOXML and the final RTM Compatibility Pack. Evidently there were some late changes to the OOXML specification, including a change in namespace URI’s. So the [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

The OOXML Compatibility Pack

September 6, 2006

Just saw something worth noting. I was on a machine running Office XP and tried to open an Office Open XML (OOXML) formatted document. I don’t know why I tried that, but I did. Word was smart enough to put up the following dialog: Now, that is something I hadn’t seen before. I think we [...]

14 comments Read the full article →

A quick look at the 0.2 ODF Add-in for Word

September 4, 2006

An updated version of the Microsoft-sponsered ODF Add-in for Word has been posted. A few weeks ago I had tried out the earlier 0.1 version with results you can read here and here. The Add-in’s Highlights page for the 0.2 version says that “This release is comprehensive with respect to Text, Formatting, Paragraphs, Images, Styles [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Traduttore, Traditore

July 13, 2006

Brian Jones in his blog entry of 11 July 2006, comments on their recently announced ODF Translator: It’s directly exposed in the UI. We’re even going to make it really easy to initially discover the download. We already need to do this for XPS and PDF, so we’ll also do it for ODF. There will [...]

7 comments Read the full article →