Microsoft has announced that the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, will include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A, and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.
When using SP2, Office users will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install an add-in. Users will also be able to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of Office XP and Office 2003, Microsoft says it will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.
