MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16 released: Office 2007 translators

DataViz has released MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16, the latest version of its software for translating file formats.

The primary new feature in this release is a set of translators for Windows Word 2007 and Excel 2007 documents. The company has posted a page indicating what formatting is retained in translated Word 2007 and Excel 2007 files. For instance, the pre-Release of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16 will perform the following translations on Excel 2007 documents:

• Basic Structure -Workbook and Worksheets
• Basic cell content
• Cell Alignment
• Character Formatting
• Number Formatting
• Column widths/Row heights
• Font/Font size information
• Cell Notes
• Named Ranges

For more information on the new release of MacLinkPlus, see DataViz's product page.

With its new file formats, Office 2007 creates documents that aren't readily accessible under any current version of Office for Mac OS X (v.x or 2004). Microsoft has promised beta file conversion utilities in Spring 2007 that will allow you to open these files (dubbed "Open XML") in Office 2004.

Files created with the new Open XML format used by Office 2007 are actually ZIP packages that contain various XML files as well as images and other data. Since they are actually archived folders, the "meat" of any document will be stored in a directory (or directories) within the document packages. For instance, in a .docx document (created by Word 2007), there is a directory labeled word that contains various XML documents with the actual text. For Excel, items are located in the /excel directory, etc.

For further information on Office 2007 formats and related concerns, see these previous MacFixIt articles:

• Working with Office 2007 documents under Mac OS X: Extracting text from .docx files, more
• Unofficial converter for Word 2007 documents released

Resources