OneAndOneIs2

As I mentioned yesterday, MS has released a convertor for ODF - that doesn't work very well, and it also gets tucked away in a submenu, away from the normal "Save as" dialogue, to make it harder to find & use.

However, ODF is an open standard, so ANYBODY can write software for it. And Sun, being big supporters of ODF, have created a plug-in for MS Word that puts the ODF functionality right where it should be: In the list of file formats in the "Save as" box.

What's more, I just installed & used it on my work machine. And I don't have admin access to my machine - in fact, our machines are so locked-down we can't even change IE's start page. It installed without complaint, and I hunted down a few of the nastier, formatting-heavy, complicated word documents I could find. Saving them as ODF was easy and without complaint, and they opened perfectly in OpenOffice as well.

So yes, well done to Sun, I'm impressed so far by their converter. If you're obliged to use MS Office, you too may be interested in trotting along to their website and downloading a plugin that can free you forever from the problem of proprietary formats.