Such a move could also hamper data exchange with competing desktop productivity software that recognises XML, such as Corel's WordPerfect or Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, say analysts and competitors.
You would be surprised how many companies still publish documents on their website in Word format.silicon.com is still looking for your tales of Digital Blunders and so if you have hit reply instead of forward, or mistyped an inappropriate word...
By the end of the year, the open source project building the converters will move past simply opening documents and add the ability to save documents created in Word in the ODF format, said Brian Jones, a Microsoft Office program manager.
On the file format front, Microsoft said this spring it plans to have ready a beta test version of converters, allowing people with the current Office for Mac to read and write documents in the new file formats.
Later in the year, it will ship converters for spreadsheets and presentations. In the next few days, Novell intends to release a plug-in to the Suse Enterprise Linux Desktop suite that will allow users to open Microsoft Word documents and save them...
The converters, to be available on open source project hosting site SourceForge.net, let people open and save documents in either the Ecma Open XML formats or ODF. A beta version of initial converters is expected at the end of July and will become...