It was just announced that the next version of Microsoft Office will natively support the PDF file format in addition to Open XML, RTF, HTML and .Doc. This is a huge step forward. There were already third party tools to do this but having PDF natively supported is much better.
The state of Massachusetts should be happy. They decreed that by January 2007 all products used by the state must support either PDF or OpenDocument format.
David Coursey wrote in eWeek.com that the state was making a bad decision. He said "I find it hard to imagine that a set of files written in OpenDocument today will be as easy to open in 20 years as files written in Microsoft data formats."
Brian Jones from the Office development team confirmed the plans in his blog. PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath.
Wow, now it can be on par with Open Office who has had this support for years.
Posted by: | October 02, 2005 at 02:13 PM
Interesting. Wonder what functionality will be supported through ODMA and other MS APIs.
Toolkit licensing from Adobe can be very expensive for an ISV.
Posted by: Raj Bala | October 03, 2005 at 03:42 PM