Features

Towards the end of May, Microsoft announced that the next service pack (SP2) for Office 2007 would include the ability to open and save ODF (Open Document Format) documents directly, rather than through a third-party add-in. It will also include the Save As PDF/XPS function that had previously been downgraded to an add-in after a legal spat with Adobe. This means ODF will become a first-class format in Office, and system administrators and users could choose it as their default format for all new documents. But the day Microsoft makes ODF the default document format out of the box, I'll buy and publicly consume a very large cheese fedora.

Properly supporting ODF in Office will be much better and more flexible than the half-arsed add-in route Microsoft has taken so far. The version of ODF Microsoft has chosen to support isn't the ISO Standard version 1.0 (ISO 26300), nor the yet-to-be-finalised version 1.2 that will include definitions of the spreadsheet functions; it's ODF version 1.1, which is supported by most ODF implementations available today. Microsoft has also said it will join the OASIS technical committee to work on the next version of ODF and join the ISO/IEC working group, which will control ODF's maintenance. While this bodes well for interoperability in a couple of years' time, until then there will still be formatting options and features in Microsoft Office documents that won't fit into an ODF document and vice versa.

Hopefully Microsoft will expand the existing compatibility checkers (which run if you try to save an Office 2007 document in Office 97-2003 format) to work with ODF files as well. This feature at least tells you which

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features in your document won't render properly in the chosen format, which beats the reverse experience in OpenOffice, where it just says some formatting may not be saved or loaded correctly, without clarifying which features these are, or if you have actually used them at all.

Also included in SP2 will be the ability to save as PDF (version 1.5), PDF/A (an ISO standard for document archiving) and XPS, Microsoft's rival to PDF that's currently being standardised through Ecma International. Microsoft will also actively participate in the future evolution of PDF, which suggests it has mended its fences with Adobe.

Don't expect Office 2007 SP2 until the "first half" of 2009. The next version of Office, codenamed "Office 14", should be released around the same time and that will update the OOXML file format with the changes agreed by ISO to make Office compliant with ISO/IEC 29500. We're still to hear how/if those changes will be delivered for Office 2007, 2003, XP and 2000.

Document properties

All Office documents - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Project, Visio and so on - have a common set of properties such as Title, Author, Keywords, Comments, Last Print Date, Number of Pages and more. There are 34 built-in properties in all, but you can add more. Properties form part of the metadata of the document - data used to describe, classify and codify the actual data within the document. It can help in searching for documents, as metadata is faster to search and carries more weight in search results than the body text of a document. If you searched for "Information Superhighway", for example, a document with that phrase in the title or subject would appear higher in the results than one that used it only in its body text.

Document properties can be viewed and edited in several ways: each program has a Document Properties panel or dialog. In applications with the Ribbon interface it's typically under the Office Button | Prepare | Properties, which displays a simple properties panel at the top of the document. A drop-down button above the properties lets you view the advanced properties dialog, where you can add custom ones. Older-style programs just have the advanced dialog under File | Properties.