ODF Support in MS Office 2007

I guess it’s all over the news right now, that the latest service pack (SP2) for MS Office 2007 will enable Office to import and export ODF natively. This blog piece by Doug Mahugh touches on the word processor part of their ODF support. I haven’t yet tried it myself, but judging by Doug’s blog article it looks pretty impressive.

But, being more of a spreadsheet person, I’m personally more interested in how it fares in Excel to Calc interoperability. Since their ODF support is on ODF 1.1, which predates the on-going OpenFormula specification work, I’d be interested to see how compatible the formulas are. Technically speaking, as of ODF 1.1, interpreting formula expressions was pretty much application-specific, so I would not be surprised even if they are not compatible at all. But we’ll just have to see.

Either way, I find this news very encouraging. This is undoubtedly a big step toward proliferation of ODF as a practical document exchange format.