DV Hardware bringing you the hottest news about processors, graphics cards, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ATi, hardware and technology!

On Wednesday, the company said it plans to add new formats to Office 2007, including the Open Document Format (ODF), Portable Document Format (PDF), and XML Paper Specification (XPS). The new formats will be added to Office as part of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, due in the first half of next year.

ODF, a rival document format to Office's native format, has become popular with governments and schools. Microsoft, acknowledging requests for compatibility with ODF, released a converter to allow Word users to open documents saved in the OpenDocument format.

Likewise, the company had earlier made available an add-on for Office that allows users to save documents in PDF format.

Now, the company is going a step further by building ODF and PDF support directly into Office. In addition, customers will now be able to set ODF as the default file format in Office 2007.

The company said it will continue to work with the open-source community to make a translator for ODF available for older versions of Office, such as Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003.