A Minor Change with a Major Impact

It will probably go unnoticed by most people. Yet, I think it is pretty clever that Windows 7 WordPad will include support for ODF and Open XML document formats in the next release.  This goes back to the promises Microsoft made about data portability that really stands out with WordPad 7. 

The obvious benefit is that documents that you create in Microsoft Office Word 2007 or OpenOffice Writer can be edited and updated in WordPad 7.  Then you can roundtrip those changes back out to Word or Writer.  What’s better is that you can also roundtrip those changes to the forthcoming Office Web Applications or Google Apps.  WordPad is still at the low-end of document editing programs. However, this minor changes does bring it forward to be a standards-based document editor. 

Windows 7 WordPad with Fluent UI

Windows Vista/XP WordPad