Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today’s distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise — contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe — upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don’t have to “Save As” and export to ODF if you don’t ever want to use Microsoft’s OOXML or Office 2003 “compatibility mode;” you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice.
Not that Microsoft won’t give you a little heck for it along the way, in classic Microsoft fashion. For example, after changing our default format to ODF, we tried saving a simple Word file that had nothing more than a single sentence of placeholder text, nothing else. Immediately we saw the first security warning, “Document1 may contain features that are not compatible with this format. Do you want to continue to save in this format?” The check box at the bottom of the dialog suggested to us that we would see such a dialog each and every time, unless and until we checked “Don’t show this message again.” That’s Microsoft’s little way of saying, don’t blame us if your documents don’t turn out 100% the way you expect them to.
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