A few weeks back, I wrote about how smart Office 2003 had been in detecting my need for an Office 2007 document converter and opening it for me. If only I could say the same for Office 2004 on the Mac. I’m all too familiar with Microsoft product groups working independently but the MacBU has excelled (excuse the pun) in its inability to ship a working document converter for the Open XML document formats more than seven months after the release of Office 2007 on Windows.
To make matters worse, Office 2008 for Mac (which uses the new file formats) is a closed beta so I can’t use that to convert/open the files.
Ironically, there are various reports of using an alternative office suite like OpenOffice or NeoOffice to open the files! Hmm… not such a smart business move for Microsoft then…
My Digital Life has information on the various options for working with Open XML in Office 2004 for Mac. Mac Mojo (the Mac Office team blog) has information about a beta converter for Word documents (only).
If microsoft want to shoot themselves in the foot and lose their own customers, that’s up to them. That just means more users (and hopefully developers) for open source software.