Microsoft on Thursday bowed to pressure from governments to offer new free open source software that will allow its Office suite of programmes to handle documents in rival formats.

The company said it would develop tools to build a “technical bridge” between its own Open XML document format and the OpenDocument format (ODF).

“In addition to being made available as free, downloadable add-inns for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, the translation tools will be developed and licensed as open source software,” said Microsoft.

The company explained that the move was “in response to government requests."

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