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MS admits that ODF exists!

It seems that MS have at least admitted that ODF exists and is worth supporting — albeit in the scaled-back kind of way which typically pleads “we don’t really want to do this!”

I’m wondering how MS’re going to oddly restrict what this software actually achieves, in order to present their own formats as being somehow mysteriously “better”, but it is at least heartening to see them finally driven to acknowledge that OpenDocument is important to deal with.

I strongly suspect that the main point in this interface’s existence will be to prevent OpenOffice itself from being installed when the MS convertors “will do”, but let’s wait and see what happens...

I’ve had to use MS-Office instead of OpenOffice a couple of times over the last few days, and things which are simple in OOo are difficult in MSO — and in some cases items like the corporate stylesheet configuration on the site makes said things effectively impossible to do right — so my money is on MS having realised this kind of problem & decided to spit out a stop-gap until they’ve had a year or few to file some of the corners off their own stuff.

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