The ODF-only evangelists have had a rough month. First, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided that its CIOs should have the ability to choose OoXML, PDF and RTF to best meet the needs of citizens.
Now, Apple removes beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the anti-OoXML community’s favorite bits of FUD – nobody except Microsoft can/does implement the OoXML standard. The iPhone and the newly released iWork application suite from Apple both natively support OoXML.
According to Brian Jones at Microsoft, here is the most up-to-date list of applications that are implementing the OoXML standard:
iPhone – http://www.apple.com/iphone/
iWork – native support. http://www.apple.com/iwork/
Older versions of Office – As you all know, folks who have older versions of Office can download a free update that allows them to read and write the open xml formats. It’s the second most popular download on the Microsoft site with millions of downloads already.
OpenOffice – There are a couple implementations in the works here. Thanks to Novell, you can read and write the OpenXML formats with OpenOffice. The Sun folks are also involved as they move from the XSLT approach to a more
WordPerfect – Corel has announced support for OpenXML in an upcoming release of their office suite. (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=226)
Palm OS – Documents To Go brings OpenXML support to smartphone and PDA devices powered by the Palm operating system (http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/premium/index.html?redirect=hp_dxtg_palm)
NeoOffice – NeoOffice brings OpenXML support to the mac (http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=117)
MindMapping – Mindjet’s MindManager allows you to follow the logical workflow of first brainstorming, then creating a document outline, and then writing you document. You can brainstorm your idea in MindManager, and then convert those into a wordProcessingML document. (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2092894,00.asp)
OpenXML Writer– The folks up at OpenXML.biz have build a free open source text editor called "OpenXML Writer" that allows you to edit WordprocessingML files. (http://www.openxml.biz/OpenXMLWriter.html)
Gnumeric – Gnumeric is an open source spreadsheet application that was one of the first applications out there to show support for SpreadsheetML. The latest build from this summer has very rich SpreadsheetML support. (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/)
Web Development (PHP) – There is an open source project up on codeplex where they are creating a set of PHP classes which allow you to read and write SpreadsheetML files. (http://www.codeplex.com/PHPExcel)
Java Developers – There is a project up on sourceforge where they are creating a set of Java APIs to make programming against the openxml formats much easier for Java developers. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml4j/)
Data Reporting – In Monarch V.9.0 from Datawatch you have the ability to create reports of your data using SpreadsheetML (http://www.datawatch.com/datawatch/news.asp?display=detail&id=128)
XML to PDF – Altsoft XML2PDF server 2007 supports the import of WordprocessingML files (http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=43989)
Word and Character Counting on Mac – Word Counter 2.2.1 is an application for Mac OS X, and it supports a variety of file formats, including WordprocessingML (http://osxfreeware.blogspot.com/2007/02/word-counter-221.html)
Convert docx to simple html – The docx converter allows you to transform WordprocessingML documents into either plain text or simple html directly from their website. (http://docx-converter.com/)
