Open Document Format approved by OSI
The world now has an open office file format approved by the International Organization for Standardization (OSI). The Open Document Format (ODF) used primarily by the free OpenOffice suite was formally approved on November 30 as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. The folks at Ars Technical have more.
This is great news for further adoption of OpenOffice… ISO standards carry a lot of weight, especially with governments. The ODF spec is far from perfect (e.g. how formulas are represented in spreadsheets is not defined) but it’s good enough. The main benefit is that it’s documented and can be implemented by anyone, unlike the closed MS Office formats. To read MS Office files you face having to reverse engineer the file formats, which Microsoft keeps changing to “put them on a treadmill”, as they once called that strategy.
Adoption of ODF by Massachusetts and other governments is continuing. That’s good news for us… government documents need to be readable for many decades and should not require citizens to buy expensive proprietary software to read them. Try opening a document created in Office 95 (or Word 6 DOS) sometime… if they used lots of formatting, good luck reading them with Office XP. Fifty years from now you may not even be able to buy any version of MS Office at any price, or the proprietary operating systems required to run it. The PDF/A format been around for years for archival purposes (and an ISO standard since 2005) , but hasn’t been widely used that I know of. Organizations prefer to avoid the expense and delay of converting files to a read-only format, I guess.
OpenOffice is the primary application that reads ODF formats, but not the only one. The Abiword word processor has supported it for a while, and KWord (part of the KDE office suite used mostly on Linux) can now also use it. Google Docs & Spreadsheet also support ODF.
As for the commercial office suites, ODF plugins exist for various versions of MS Word. You’d think that Corel WordPerfect would already support ODF, since Corel is a founding member of the ODF Alliance, but Wordperfect can’t read ODF just yet (I’m sure the delay is unrelated to the 25% stake Corel accepted from Microsoft back in 2000). Corel has announced they will add support for both ODF and Microsoft’s new file formats in mid-2007.
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