By Rupert Goodwins, 3 October 2005 16:50
NEWS Microsoft announced on Sunday that Office 12 would support saving documents in PDF format.
The company claimed to be receiving more than 120,000 requests per month for such a function, and said it would be available in all Office applications that generated documents, reports or diagrams. It will appear in the second public beta of the product, due in the first quarter of 2006.
Darren Strange, Microsoft's UK Office 12 product manager, said: "The users are looking for a simple way to exchange information in an open way they understand. It's an open, published standard and we're delighted to include it."
Microsoft is also introducing its own XML Paper Specification (XPS), he said, "which is in the same solution space. That's built into Vista, and we hope that it will become the prevalent standard in the longer term but we'll support PDF as well. XPS will have viewers built into the platform and we'll have a significant development platform, which is not the case with PDF".
Strange said there would be partner opportunities to develop solutions using the platform's capabilities, "for example, to generate output on the fly from XML formatted documents".
When asked why, with such great demand over time for PDF support, it had taken until now to include it, he said: "It's already available in Office for Mac and Live Meeting, so it's a development. Admittedly, it was in Live Meeting when we bought Groove Networks but we didn't take it out. These things take time."
But Microsoft still has no plans to support OpenDocument, the Oasis standard file format for productivity applications, within Office 12.
Strange said: "We're not hearing any interest from customers. Compared to PDF there isn't that sort of demand. If there was, I'd think we'd be interested in developing it."
Rupert Goodwins writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. Terry Carlin
So they're not just copying Open Office then.
2. anonymous
So now MS are calling PDF an open format.
Didn't they say the opposite when Massachusetts (or where ever it was) said they were dropping MS and going open source last month?
Hmmm, very strange.
3. Graham Coles
Already in their office product for Mac?
I'd be bloody surprised if it wasn't - OS X has had built-in pdf export in the operating system since its conception; you can export pdfs from every application on it whether it has specific support or not. In fact it would have taken them more effort not to include it.
I guess OpenDocument never stood a chance - based on the figures quoted for pdf format, it seems to take close to 1.5 million requests a year for God knows how many years before microsoft even considered including it.
By a strange quirk, nobody has asked them to develop their own standard yet they have done this in preference to the requests from customers who wanted a format everyone already uses ... I wonder why.
4. Garry Nevin
Wonderful - the Mac has done this for several years from most applications...
5. Simon
This makes sense.
Why did they hold out so long ? Simple, every document sent as a PDF is a document that doesn't rely on their software to be able to read it - so they don't want to make it easy to send PDFs.
Why do it now ? They've obviously realised that it's not hard to make PDFs and so they aren't really losing anything by providing the facility now. What they do gain is being able to make a big announcement that they are now supporting the creation of 'open standard' documents - while keeping quiet about the fact that most people could do it already.
In other words, it's all a big PR excercise to persuade the corporate lemmings who keep them in business that MS really do have the customers best interests at heart. Yeah, right !