Sun's OpenDocument conversion plugin for Microsoft Office is now available for download. Released with little fanfare earlier this week, the plugin provides support for reading and writing ODF files in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Version 1.0 supports Microsoft Office 2003, 2000, and XP, but not 2007. According to Sun developer Malte Timmerman, Office 2007 isn't supported yet because it has a document filter API handling bug that causes it to ignore third-party document loading handlers. Timmerman hopes that Microsoft will resolve this bug in an Office 2007 service pack, but says that Sun is prepared to use a workaround if the bug persists.

I tested Sun's plugin with Microsoft Office 2003 on Windows XP, primarily using documents created with OpenOffice on Linux. The plugin installer, which is a 30 MB download, automatically makes Microsoft Office the default program for ODT files (but not ODS or ODP) when OpenOffice isn't installed. The plugin makes it possible to load and save ODT files in Word using the regular file dialogs and toolbar buttons. Users can also set ODT as the default format for Word via the Save tab of the Options dialog. Unlike ODT, ODS and ODP files can't be saved or loaded with regular file dialogs in Powerpoint or Excel. Instead, ODF import and export buttons are available from a toolbar added by the plugin.

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When I double-clicked an ODT file after installing the plugin, it automatically launched Microsoft Word and began the conversion process. When opening the first document, the converter displays a splash screen and adds an icon to the system tray. Every single time a user opens an ODT file, Microsoft Word displays the following (very annoying) warning message: 'This file needs to be opened by the ODF Text Document text converter, which may pose a security risk if the file you are opening is a malicious file. Choose Yes to open this file only if you are sure it is from a trusted source.' There doesn't appear to be any way to prevent Word from displaying the warning dialog.

The ODT converter provides relatively good performance and appears to use RTF as an intermediate format. It handles most common formatting better than I had expected. I tested documents with headers, footers, footnotes, drawing elements, bullets, tables, graphics, an automatically generated table of contents, and a various other formatting elements. All of those features appear to be well supported, but drawing elements (like lines, arrows, and circles) were occasionally displayed in the wrong places when loaded into Word. The only other problem I noticed is with font conversion. The plugin doesn't seem to do a very good job handling fonts that aren't available on Windows, and this occasionally causes loss of formatting. The plugin should be able to do a better job of choosing Windows fonts that resemble the fonts used in the original document.

Microsoft Office For Mac

I also tested the plugin with a highly complex ODS file. In Excel, users load ODS files by clicking a special button in a toolbar rather than using the regular Open operation from the File menu. The plugin performs the conversion very, very quickly and the spreadsheet seemed to work properly when loaded. The spreadsheet I used performs a number of sophisticated computations, which still seemed to work when the file was loaded into Excel.

Sun Odf Plugin For Microsoft Office Mac Update

Although Sun's OpenDocument plugin for Microsoft Office works much better than I initially expected, there are still integration weaknesses that are inherent in Office's poor support for third-party file formats. The plugin will be useful for organizations that are attempting to migrate to OpenOffice, but it doesn't really seem like an ideal solution for organizations that wish to use ODF with Microsoft Office on a long-term basis.