Sun Microsystems has released a free extension/addon for Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003 Word, Excel and Powerpoint that allows you to open, read, create and edit OpenDocument format (ODF) based text, spreadsheet, and presentation (.odt, .ods, and .odp) documents and files from within Microsoft’s Office program. You can even make the default association for ODF text files (.odt) with Microsoft Word [via Sun Blog]

The ODF plug-in works well with screen reader & magnifiers as well as voice recognition & dictation systems.

The plug-in is not compatible with Microsoft Office 2007