July 6th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Brian Jones just announced that Microsoft will provide ODF (OpenDocument Format) support for Office 2007. The support will be developed in form of an OpenXML-ODF translator. It is a seperate program developed as a sourceforge project with a BSD license. A prototype for Word 2007 is already available for download and a final version of that should be ready by the end of the year. Excel and PowerPoint support will follow in 2007.
For the full announcement, details and all links, see Brian’s blog post.
July 2nd, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
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In my initial blog post about COM Add-Ins for Office 2007, I wrote the following:
“The add-in will not only load in Word 2007, but also Word 2003 (I don’t have any earlier Office version so I don’t know if it will load in those as well). As it is specifically geared to 2007 though, there is no point in having the add-in loaded in 2003 as well.”
“In order to be nice to the user, we should therefore automatically unload the add-in if it is not loaded in Word 2007 (or any later version).”
“If the add-in is not loaded in Word 2007, it unloads itself using the Microsoft.Office.Core.COMAddIn.Connect value (setting it equal to false).”
This seemed to work well. However, users in the public Word newsgroup where reporting that the add-in regularly didn’t load anymore when they opened Word 2007. At the same time though, no one in the private beta newsgroups was reporting this particular problem. So what was going on?
The situation only arises in a side-by-side installation of Word 2003 and 2007. Technical beta members might have such a configuration (I do e.g.), but they might also be running 2007 on a dedicated computer or Virtual Machine. Yet even when they have such a configuration, it is unlikely that they open Word 2003 much anymore. This is partially due to the fact that they are probably using Word 2007 mainly by now and also partially due to the fact that opening Word 2003 resets doc file associations and other settings (due to a bug in Beta 2). Restoring this back to 2007 takes 10-15 mins (e.g. by running Office Diagnostics) and everyone therefore tries to avoid it. I for example never open Word 2003 anymore on my desktop at all. Hence no one in the technical beta really encountered the issue.
So what is the issue? When Word 2003 is opened, the add-in unloads itself. However, this changes the LoadBehavior of the add-in from 3 (load at startup) to 2 (disabled). Therefore the add-in is no longer loaded when Word 2007 is opened. After experimenting with this for a while, it seems that the only solution to get rid of this issue is to stop being nice when Word 2003 is opened and simply keep the add-in loaded. V1.3 therefore removes the code that automatically unloads the add-in when a non-2007 version is detected.
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