The new program, which has been under development for about year and finished initial testing last week, is designed to let Microsoft Office manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, Edwards said.

ODF (Open Document Format) has been endorsed by several governments, which tout the format is a way to break the stranglehold Microsoft has on the document-creation market. Open XML, on the other ...

While OpenOffice generally does a passable job of converting between Office and ODF files, more intricate presentations or heavily-formatted documents may be more susceptible to losses.

We're publishing a feature article on the OOXML and ODF file formats for our next issue of Redmond Developer News, and we want to hear from you about the technical strengths and weaknesses of each.

but OpenOffice.org 3.0 and later default to ODF 1.2. In my initial tests with files saved in both versions, however, I didn’t experience any miscues. I started out opening a simple ODF text ...