The Dutch Council of State will let loose the software it uses to convert proprietary document formats created in MS Office into Open Source documents which follow the Open Document Format (ODF) protocol. The software, which has been developed by Council employee Marcel Pennock and uses existing plug-ins, offers an icon which centrally converts documents to either ODF of PDF in the background.

Conversion testing has so far been successful, with just minor colour issues found in PDF files created by the software.

Sun has updated its ODF Plug-in to version 1.2, available for Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 SP1+. Make sure to check out the tech specs before taking the plunge and downloading the 33.06 MB installer. Don't worry about the fact that Sun forces you to choose between Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, and doesn't have an option for Vista, because the installer is one and the same for all of the choices.

"If all that proprietary vendors are waiting for before they directly support ODF is a 'broad-based customer request,' then they should be aware that such a demand already exists in New York state," according to the May 2008 Electronic Documents Report to the Governor and Legislature prepared by New York state's IT office.

Read the complete report.

Microsoft Corp.'s plan to add ODF support to its Office applications suite next year reflects continued challenges for the software vendor's own Office Open XML file format, as the industry moves ahead with adopting ODF and sorts out Open XML's troubles. Though Open XML was ratified as an open standard by the ISO international standards body on April 1, it continues to face impediments to widespread adoption. On Friday, it was revealed that South Africa is appealing ISO's approval of the standard.

As functionality traditionally associated with desktop applications moves to the Web, developers are looking for new ways to handle that computational heavy lifting on the server side. But if you need to create a Web-based application that behaves like an office suite, there's no need to reinvent the wheel: the open source OpenOffice.org suite can actually serve as the powerhouse behind a Web application. In this article, you'll learn how to combine OpenOffice.org and Dojo to create a simple Ajax-based spreadsheet application much like Google Spreadsheets.