Novell to launch MS Office/OpenOffice converter

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According to intelligententerprise.com, Linux company Novell plans to release an open-source interoperability technology between the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and Microsoft Office 2007.

The Waltham, Mass., company, which publishes the Suse-Linux distribution, recently entered a multimillion dollar partnership with Microsoft in order to provide better interoperability of software between the two operating systems.

Along those lines the company now is working with the software maker and others to develop bidirectional translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between the two suites. The first, the word processing translator, should debut in late January, intelligententerprise.com writes.

The translators will be available as plug-ins to OpenOffice.org. In addition, Novell plans to release to the open-source community code needed to integrate the Open XML format, developed by Microsoft, into OpenOffice, which natively supports the ISO-certified standard Open Document Format. The integration code is expected to help maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across Office 2007 and the open-source Office suite.

While OpenOffice.org support ODF by default, open, xml-based formats are a novelty for Microsoft Office. The impact for the translation and localization community can be enormous, since xml documents are not bound to a platform.

Hence it can be expected that platform-independent computer aided translation (CAT) tools will soon be ready to comfortably edit and translate Microsoft Office documents. This will have effect on xml, XLiff or text-based localization and CAT-tools running on Linux.

Source: intelligententerprise.com