OASIS OpenDocument Format

Release: 2008-01-27
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OpenDocument

Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is an open document format providng word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, charts, databasing, formula and drawing regardless of program or operating system. It is a standard developed by a collection of companies including the OpenOffice.org Project, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Corel, Red Hat and Novell.
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) was approved by the Organisation of the Advancement of Structural Information Standards (OASIS) on May 1st 2005 and is also now a global standard from the Organisation of International Standards (ISO) as of May 3rd 2006 as ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

The format is based on the OpenOffice.org XML format but improved and extended to include databasing. It uses ZIP technology to archive and compress the collection of content, settings, metadata as XML and related files including images that make up the physical documents:

• OpenDocument Text (.odt) – word process,
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) – spreadsheet,
• OpenDocument Presentation (.odp) – presentation,
• OpenDocument Drawing (.odg) – drawing (Vector Graphics),
• OpenDocument Database (.odb) – data management.
• OpenDocument Templates (.ott, .ots, .otp, .otg),
• OpenDocument Master Document (.otm),
• OpenDocument Formula (.odf),
• HTML Template (.oth).

Compared to proprietary formats, OpenDocument's file size is half or even a third of the size.

OpenOffice.org, Novell, KOffice, Corel, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM, Opera Software and Apple are amongst those who actively support this standard.

Applications natively supporting OpenDocument Format

Those that open and save using the OpenDocument format by default:

• OpenOffice.org 2.x and higher,
• NeoOffice 2.2.1,
• StarOffice/StarSuite 8,
• KOffice 1.5 and higher,
• IBM Workplace,
• IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 2 (OpenDocument Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation only),
• Google Docs (OpenDocument Text & OpenDocument Spreadsheet),
• Mobile Office (no database or draw support),
• Aukyla 2.1,
• Firefox ODF Reader extension 0.2.1 (OpenDocument Text only for Mozilla Firefox 1.5+),
• Visioo-writer 0.6.1 (actually it's just a viewer) (OpenDocument Text (& OpenOffice.org Text) only),
• Copernic Desktop Search 2.1.1 (OpenDocument Text, Spreadsheet, Drawing only),
• Beagle Desktop Search 0.2.17 (OpenDocument Text, Spreadsheet, Drawing only).

Other Applications that support OpenDocument

• OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 (import only, no database support),
• StarOffice/StarSuite 7.5 (import only, no database support),
• NeoOffice 1.2 (import only, no database support),
• Plugin (version 1.0.1) for Google Desktop (no database supportf),
• Abiword 2.4.6 (Import and export OpenDocument Text (& OpenOffice.org Text) only),
• Scribus 1.3.3 (Import only, no database support),
• TextEdit 1.5 (in Mac OS X.5 Leopard) (limited support of OpenDocument Text only)

More information is available at http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org.

Microsoft are currently allowing a plugin to be developed for Microsoft Office to open, save and convert to and from OpenDocument format.

Support continues to increase.

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