Office for Mac Open XML Converter Released
Last December there was a bit of ruckus regarding Office for Mac’s inability to work with Office 2007’s new XML-based document formats. While the promised Office for Mac-integrated converters have yet to arrive (6-8 more weeks), Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has released a standalone converter application that provides read-only access to Office Open XML files and converts Word documents to RTF.
Yay thank you, exactly what I needed lately.
Finally! Can’t wait to see a beta of Office 2008!
I wasn’t even aware of this problem, but that’s so like Microsoft. It must have been _so_ hard for them to come up with developers to write a converter to go from XML to a different plaintext format… if only a technology existed that could make this task easier. Hrm.
On a side note, when is someone going to come out with an office-killer. Windows might be a big seller, but Office is what keeps Microsoft alive. Kill Office, and MS will be in biiiig trouble.
I love the explanation of why they chose to make it convert to RTF - ‘[RTF is] simply a highly convenient intermediate format for the beta converter to use’. Genius. If only the rest of the developers inside MS thought like that.
There’s always NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/) which has full read/write support for “OpenXML” Word files.
I am currently a PPC IMAC G5 user (Tiger 10.4) ; Recently I have been reading various email publications about the merits of Ubuntu Linux. I purchased The Keir Thomas “Begining Ubuntu Linux manual accompanied by a CD, I am unable to open the files much less get the system installed. I am going to purchase a new Apple Power PC Laptop with the Leopard software installed this November. What benefits could Ubuntu Linux have over the new MAC software? Looking for guidance to avoid further agravation!
If you’re having trouble with Ubuntu, Mac is probably a good choice. Ubuntu is a linux distribution and as such benefits from the stability and robustness of the linux core. It also incorporates package management utilities that make it very easy to download and install free (open source) software applications that are thoroughly tested to ensure compatibility. There is a great support community, and the project is actively developed and improved.
Max OS X, however, is also a great operating system. It is built on top of “Darwin,” which was derived from the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) operating system. Thus, it is also an extremely robust and stable system. OS X is also POSIX compliant, so it can run many of the applications that a linux distribution can without modification (and almost all applications if you know what you’re doing).
I’ll stop there since we’re kinda threadjacking here… I’d recommend checking out the Wikipedia articles on the two operating systems for more information.
It took them like 4+ months to release this beta and half-baked software? I’m using Neo-office with full read/write support and last time I checked they don’t have the resources MS have. This is getting lame…
I’ll stick with NeoOffice thanks, it got my through my all important dissertation with no problems, and it offers everything MSOffice can do for way less than the £200+ fee, (about $400).
MS is really letting Mac users down with this!