The ISO standard OpenDocument format (ODF) is a free and open file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. It is a De facto standard used by OpenOffice.org.
Sun Microsystems has developed this ODF Plugin to enable MS Office to read and write ODF documents. It works seamlessly with MS Office 2007 (SP1 or higher), MS Office 2003, MS Office XP and MS Office 2000.
This ODF Plugin is provided by Sun Microsystems for free, and it integrates with the "Load" and "Save As" dialog and the "Save (Ctrl+S)" shortcut of MS Office Word. It simplifies the import and export of ODF documents with a new toolbar in MS Office Excel and PowerPoint.
With this plugin, you can now switch from native MS document format to world recognised ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format developed by the OASIS industry consortium, and most importantly, you can use and exchange without hassle the document files with OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, NeoOffice, KOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony and many more office application suites.
Click here to go to the download page for Sun ODF Plugin for MS Office.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office
Beijing to host OpenOffice.org Conference 2008
Redflag2000 of China has won the majority votes and awarded to host for the OpenOffice.org Annual International Conference 2008 (OOoCon 2008) in Beijing by 10-17 October this year. This international open source conference will be held in the 5-star Beijing Asia Hotel.
This is an annual premier event for anyone interested in or working with OpenOffice.org. It is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve.
During the conference, top open source technical staff and backbones throughout the world will gather together and share outcomes in open source technology among others, advocate progress in effective application of open source technology, improve world software technology level and try to break technology monopoly through forums, lectures and other interactive manners.
Click here for more information and latest updates about the Beijing OOoCon 2008.
OpenOffice.org - the free and open productivity suite
Nowadays, office application suite is an essential software in almost all PCs. Each Microsoft Office license costs you from a few hundred ringgit up to a few thousand ringgit (based on the bundled applications in the suite) to legalize your installation and usage in your PC.
If you try to use unlicensed or pirated copy of Microsoft Office, it might be rendered unusable after some time if you don't activate the product or pass their 'Genuine Advantage' Authentication. If you cracked the product and use it, your Microsoft Office will have no support at all, and you might not be able to update it to fix problems, bugs and security issues. This attempt is also illegal, and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) might take action against you, bring law enforcement officers to raid your office or home, seize your PC, summon you to court, and charge you a big fine.
Well, you don't have to take that risk, and you can still have a well supported and fully functional office application suite alternative to Microsoft Office, which is free to copy, distribute and install in as many PCs as you like, at no cost and no license fee, thanks to OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org is both a product and an open source project with GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems and jointly developed by over 450,000 worldwide developers including Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. This free office application suite consists of:
- Writer the word processor (similar to MS Words)
- Calc the spreadsheet (similar to MS Excel)
- Impress the multimedia presentation producer (similar to MS PowerPoint)
- Draw the diagram illustrator and desktop publisher (similar to CorelDraw and MS Publisher)
- Base the desktop database management system (similar to MS Access)
- Math the mathematical equations, symbols and formula editor (similar to MS Equation Editor)
- it is multiplatform, setup file available for installation in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc.
- it is directly included in most Linux distro such as Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.
- it is multilingual, supports for over 100 languages globally.
- it pioneered the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument file formats (ODF).
- it can open, read and write to a vast variety of document formats, including MS Office documents, Palm AportisDoc, Pocket PC documents, etc. Support for the new MS Office 2007 documents is also available in OpenOffice 3.0, which is currently under beta release.
- it can directly output any of its documents to PDF files.
- it supports various macro languages in OOo Basic, Python, BeanShell, JavaScript, etc.
- it is professionally supported by Sun Microsystems as well as the OpenOffice community at large.