Open Source Industry Australia Limited (OSIA) has welcomed Microsoft's move to create a "translator" that will allow people to use Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

On Thursday, Microsoft launched the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, which is a popular site for hosting open source projects. Until now, Microsoft has insisted that it would not natively support OpenDocument in Office, citing lack of demand.

Donna Benjamin, a spokesperson for the industry body, claimed Microsoft's apparent change of heart was due to the software giant finally taking ODF seriously.

"[Microsoft] did much the same thing with the Internet, where they initially rejected the open standard and open source TCP/IP protocols and HTML document formats, only to do a U-turn and support them when they saw that that's where the industry was heading," said Benjamin in a statement.

However, the OSIA did criticise Microsoft for relying on a translator rather than fully supporting OpenDocument: "Voices in the industry have already raised concerns that Microsoft's approach of creating 'optional plug-ins' is not an elegant solution, and will ultimately create confusion and lead to data loss".

News.com's Martin LaMonica contributed to this report.