This is pretty big news. According to an official press release from Microsoft, they are going to sponsor an open source project, its aim being to build tools to “build a technical bridge between the Microsoft^® Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF)”.

In case you don’t know, the OpenDocument Format is an industry standard file format for documents which is the default format for the free, cross-platform office suite OpenOffice.org, and some other free office tools (like KOffice). It’s not currently easily supported by Microsoft Office.

This probably means that Office 2007 will have support for reading and writing OpenDocument files, and it will become easier for rival suites like OpenOffice.org to read and write Microsoft Office files with complex formatting etc.

Microsoft did hint that not all of the features of the Office ‘Open XML’ format will be translated to ODF documents (or vice versa).

“Open XML and ODF were designed to meet very different customer requirements … the Open XML formats are unique in their compatibility and fidelity to billions of Office documents, helping protect customers’ intellectual investments … in contrast, ODF focuses on more limited requirements, is architected very differently and is now under review in OASIS subcommittees to fill key gaps such as spreadsheet formulas, macro support and support for accessibility options. As a result, certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats.”

So basically that means that the features that Microsoft are really selling Office on, like the digital rights management technology (“helping protect customers’ intellectual investments”) won’t work in ODF documents. Still, this will allow documents without this generally business-grade functionality to work no problem.

So, is this move a genuine wish to interoperate by Microsoft, or is it simply a PR stunt designed to keep the courts and anti-trust lawsuits off Microsoft’s back? I think whichever it is, it’s good progress and can only really help to make sure that whatever programs you choose to use, you can collaborate and share files with others.

Oh, and by the way if you have the Office 2007 Beta, you can take a sneak peek at the actual XML files and stuff that make up the document. Take a .docx file for example, and rename it to .zip. Unzip and you can see what actually powers the new file formats. In fact, this also works with OpenDocument files made in OpenOffice and other programs (rename the .odt, .odp and .ods files to .zip and take a look).