Add Support for the Open Document Format to MS Office 2007

More and more people are using OpenOffice as an alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite. OpenOffice.org is a free software suite with a text processing and a spreadsheet program similar to Word and Excel. OpenOffice is used a lot by Linux users, but even on Windows, it can be installed as an alternative to MS Office.

So what happens when you need to exchange documents between the two? Well, OpenOffice will open most MS Office documents, although not all features will be supported. You might miss some markup or formatting, but in general, it opens up pretty well.

The latest Office versions have direct support for the Open Document Format. In Word and Excel, for example, you can directly open and save in the Open Document Format. Do note that although they read ODF version 1.2, they will only write in ODF 1.3.

If you want to open an open document format file in older versions of Office, like Office 2007, or 2010 you need to install a converter. The converter will convert the ODF documents from OpenOffice to MS Office format. The converter add-in can be downloaded from the sourceforge webpage.

Download the installer and run it when complete. Note that the program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher, so if that is not installed, you will need to install that too. During the installation of the add-in, you can select which converters you want to install.

You can also select the file extensions to associate with Office. By default, none of the open document format extensions are selected, but it is convenient to associate all three with MS Office.

Next time you start MS Word, you will see a new ODF menu entry in the Word menu. Using the new ODF menu entry, you can open and save documents in the OpenDocument format. The same applies to Excel and PowerPoint.