Microsoft and other development partners recently announced the completion of the 1.0 release of a translator between OpenDocument format (ODF) and Open XML document formats.

When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format.

The translator is an open source project freely available on SourceForge, hence it may also be plugged into non-Microsoft word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML.

Microsoft announced its support for the open source project to build a technical bridge between Open XML and ODF in July 2006 to provide interoperability between formats.

"We believe in delivering interoperability by design; in this case, by working with partners and members of the open source community we have achieved that goal," said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft. "The translator project has been built to be independent of any one application, and has proved to be useful for both Microsoft and our competitors in solving an interoperability challenge for customers."

Novell has announced that the Translator will be natively implemented in its next version of OpenOffice.

Microsoft also plans to release a similar translator project, including translators for spreadsheets and presentations. Work on the project should begin this month according to the company.

The Microsoft-funded translator project is being developed by French company CleverAge and Sonata Software of India, and tested by Dialogika of Germany and India-based Aztecsoft.