Microsoft has decided to join the Open Document movement

In a move to join the massive open document communities, and to grab some additional business, Microsoft has announced support for the ODF formats through plug-ins and translators.

Microsoft will create tools that will work to enable the communication between Microsoft Office Open XML formats and Open Document formats. The tools in question will be free to download, and licensed as open source software by the end of 2006. Support for Excel and PowerPoint are to be expected sometime in 2007.

Microsoft has stated that its Open XML document format is superior, and compromises to this format, will require customer disclosures as a necessary portion of the translation between the two document formats.