Seeing Jasia’s post about choosing a format for her articles, I’m inspired to write about open document standards. Many of you may already be familiar with OpenOffice.org – probably because it’s free – but that’s just one reason you should learn more. OpenOffice.org is free because it belongs to a category of software called “open source”. Applications developed as open source – many you are already using – have been developed without including restrictive (patented, commercially licensed, etc.) components. There’s all kinds of legal issues – way beyond my ability to explain – that are no longer problems because open source applications do not use these restrictive features.

Some time back, the OpenOffice.org (OOo for short) community began supporting the OpenDocument (opendoc) format for its platform. Their idea was to develop a standard for saving documents that would be the same regardless of the software application you used. It wouldn’t matter if you used Word, WordPerfect, OOo or Fred’s Fancy WordProcessor. You’d still be able to open/save files and share them with others. This is a family historian’s dream!

OOo and many others spent a lot of time and effort working with standards groups to develop OpenDocument. It has been accepted as an OASIS standard and is a published ISO and IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Governments are realizing this will help them manage their growing collection of digital archives and last year Massachusetts directed that all Commonwealth documents use the open document format.

Microsoft isn’t happy about this. It has the capability of costing them lots of money. Right now there’s lots of legal wrangling and media maneuvering going on, but both IBM and Sun Microsystems are supporters of opendoc so I’m very optimistic about its future. A quick check of Google Apps and Zoho Office shows they both provide the ability to open/save ODT (open document) format.

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice.org, take a look. It’s a free download with versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. I highly recommend you spend a few bucks for Solveig Haugland’s OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook. She’s also got a great instructional blog. I used OOo to create our Family Secrets Cookbook [Writer] and Miss Kate’s Autograph Book [Impress]. The only snag I had was building the table of contents and index, but that was my fault [trying to learn how to do it at the last minute - NOT a smart idea].

Standards – it’s a good thing.

Technorati Tags: OpenDocument OpenDoc OpenOffice.org OOo standards

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 8:41 am and is filed under Preservation. Both comments and pings are currently closed.