Sunday, February 14, 2010

ODF Plug-in For MS-Office

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is one of the well known open source and free software projects that has been around for a long time. Many individuals and organizations which include BIG Multinationals and Governments adopted OpenOffice.org to save on software licensing of proprietary Office Productivity Suites. Open Document Format (ODF) is the format used for all documents created using OOo. OOo can open almost all documents created by other well known suites like MS-Office. MS-Office on the other hand can not open any document created by OOo until now.

 

Sun now part of Oracle has released a plug-in for MS-Office which gives the ability to open ODFs without the need to install OpenOffice.org on your PC.

 

All you have to do to get this plug-in is to visit the official download page here

 

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Click on Download Now Button on the page which will take you to the page below where you are asked to login. You can use sun account credentials if you already have one or you have to register for one other than which there is no alternative.

 

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After you login successfully you will be presented with a link to the plug-in “odp-3.1-bin-windows-en-US.exe” of size 75.76 MB.

 

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You have the choice of using Sun Download Manager (SDM) which requires JRE or without SDM to download the plug-in. I recommend SDM if you have a slow internet connection which provides options like pause and resume.

 

Once downloaded the plug-in must be extracted to start the actual installation. Double click on the downloaded file to start the extraction which asks for a location to extract the setup files.

 

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Once Unpacked the installation starts automatically.

 

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Click Next for License Agreement

 

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Accept the license agreement and click Next for install location

 

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You can leave the default location or choose a different location for installation. Click Next for confirmation window.

 

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Click Install to start the installation.

 

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After the installation is finished all the OpenOffice.org Documents will have the below respective Icons.

 

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If you have only OpenOffice.org installed without MS-Office the same documents will have the below Icons.

 

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Note: This plug-in is only required for MS-Office 2007 and below. Office 2010 has built-in support for ODF.

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