Week off

As I just mentioned in a comment I left in last week's post, I'm actually attempting to take a bit of a break this week. We actually wrapped up the development work on Office 2007 last Friday. It's been a huge release, and it's really exciting to see it finally go out the door. I've been working on these file formats for years now, and it's going to be fun to see this release wrap up. I need a vacation :-)

I didn't want to be totally lame though and not blog at all, so here are a few interesting things I wanted to point out:

  • Office 2007 released to manufacturing - it's been a lot of hard work, but it's been worth it.
  • Save Open XML from Older versions of Office- since it's just a web release, you can already get the final version of the free updates that allows older versions of Office to open and save in the Office Open XML format (before Office 2007 is available). This latest release allows you to save using the final 1.5 version of the Ecma working draft (which will be up for a final approval vote by the Ecma General Assembly in about a month).
  • Latest version of the ODF to Open XML translator available - The team working on this open source project has announced an updated release of the translator is now available. It sounds like they are pretty much done with the ODF to Open XML conversion for wordprocessing documents, and they even have a prototype going the other way (Open XML to ODF). Another really funny thing they found when testing this tool was that while Google claims ODF support in google docs, they actually are supporting the old star office XML format, but putting the ODF extension on it.

-Brian