Open source tool released for translating between Microsoft, ODF file formats

Developers funded by Microsoft delivered on Friday the first phase of an open source tool designed to translate between the default Office 2007 file type and a competing open source document format.

Open XML Translator 1.0 is available early for free on Source Forge, the open source software development Web site where the first prototype of the Translator tool was posted last July. The tool was developed under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution license.

Open XML Translator is designed to transform documents between Open XML, which is the default format in Office 2007, and the Open Document Format (ODF), which was developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. ODF is based on an XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications.

Critics says while the Translator is a good first step toward interoperability, more is needed around standardization.

“Any steps, however small, that move toward greater openness and interoperability are welcome,” says Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. “The Microsoft translator is an acknowledgement of the growing support for ODF, in particular the growing demand and pressure from governments.”

The Translator, which is also compatible with Office 2003 and XP, only works with Microsoft Word in its first iteration. It is available in Dutch, French, German and Polish.

For example, when plugged into Word, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format. The Translator may also be plugged into competing word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML.

Versions for Excel and PowerPoint are under development and are expected to ship later this year, according to Microsoft officials.

The Translator is the result of a lingering debate, mostly spurred by issues within the government sector, over proprietary file formats in word processing and other productivity applications. The issue came to a head with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has decided to convert to nonproprietary file formats.

Critics have called the Translator a good first step as Microsoft attempts to address concerns of interoperability between its file formats and others such as ODF.

The issue, however, is one of fidelity or how faithfully the formatting on an Open XML document can be recreated in ODF, which is supported in applications developed by IBM, Novell, Sun and others.

“If you have legacy documents and the format is important to you then you have to use a lot of evaluation and testing to make sure this is going to work for you,” says Chris LeTocq, principal analyst of Guernsey Research. “If you want to generate ODF, [the Translator] will do that, but because there are more features in the Microsoft applications than are supported by ODF you have to be a little bit careful about the move.”

LeTocq says the Translator is not a silver bullet.