Now you have to pay for the ODF converter, what are the alternatives?

Oracle, the new owners of Sun, are now charging for the previously free ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office.

The plug-in lets MS Office read and write to the ODF file format which is a rival to Microsoft Office 2007/OpenXML document standard. It works with Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000.

Up to now the plug-in has been free but now it’ll cost and is effectively only available to organizations.

Oracle is charging a steep US$90 per application with a minimum purchase of 100 copies.

If you can’t afford a minimum $900 for the plug-in, what are your choices?

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Office 2007 with Service Pack 2 and Office 2010 support ODF formats internally so you could switch to one of those.

Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000 users can try the ODF Converter available on Sourceforge.

Microsoft is quietly delighted with Oracle’s decision, the high cost of an ODF converter is yet another reason for organizations to pay for Office 2007 or Office 2010.

See Also

• Word 2007 Service Pack 2 – the official fix list
• Office 2007 SP2 – list of fixes
• Got Windows 7? You can open / save Office 2007 and ODF documents
• Microsoft Office ‘support’ for ODF file format
• Now we have two official XML document standards