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Microsoft stumped up the cash for the translator, although Clever Age, DIaLOGIKa and Aztecsoft developed and tested the add-in.

The translator is available under a BSD-like licence from Clever Age, meaning it is open-source with a liberal licence.

'When plugged into Microsoft Office Word, for example, the Translator provides customers with the choice to open and save documents in ODF rather than the native Open XML format,' claims Microsoft.

The add-in should work on Office 2007, as well as the 2003 and XP versions and is localised for Dutch, French, German and Polish. Additionally, Novell is to implement it into its upcoming version of OpenOffice.

The current version of OpenOffice also allows you to save documents in the various ODF formats.

The translator in version one handles text documents, but adding in conversions for Spreadsheet (Microsoft Office Excel) and Presentation (Microsoft Office PowerPoint) will begin this month.

Customer technology previews will be posted to SourceForge.net, where the project is located, beginning in May 2007, with final versions scheduled to be available for customers in November 2007.

'The OpenXML Translator enables the global Microsoft Word user community

Simultaneous to work on the ODF translator, Microsoft is also looking to fast-track the OpenXML file formats used in Office 2007 as international standards, ultimately with the goal of having them approved by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC).

'We believe in delivering interoperability by design; in this case, by working with partners and members of the open source community we have achieved that goal,' said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft. 'The translator project has been built to be independent of any one application, and has proved to be useful for both Microsoft and our competitors in solving an interoperability challenge for customers.'

That said, OpenOffice happily saved a Word document in the ODF .odt text format, which Word struggled [see pic] to open, even with the ODF translator installed.

You can test the translator yourself by downloading it from the project page on Sourceforge, while OpenOffice, which already includes ODF capabilities can be downloaded from here.

How did Word translate ODF documents for you? Let us know by commenting below.