Microsoft Office 15 will support ODF 1.2

In Brussels, at the ODF Plugfest conference, held April 19-20, 2012, Microsoft announced a decision to implement support for the Open Document (ODF) 1.2 open format in the versions of MS Office and Office 365 products .

Currently, Office 2007 SP2, Office 365, SharePoint and SkyDrive WebApps already support the ODF 1.1 format, but this support is limited in compatibility with other office suites, and MS Office documents found in other spreadsheet packages are not readable. The crux of the problem is that Microsoft has implemented the ODF 1.1 standard and ignored the ODF 1.2 standard, which has been used by competing office suites for many years (OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, LibreOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, Calligra, etc.). Providing support for ODF 1.2 in Microsoft products will solve interoperability issues.

Estimate the real level of support for ODF 1.2 and the compatibility of the new version of Microsoft Office will be possible with the release of the first test assembly of MS Office 15 .