1. ODF standard
   • OOXML and ODF
2. File formats controls in OOo

OpenDocument Format

ODF standard

Governments and corporations have been concerned about the proprietary Microsoft Office document formats, and the resulting situation with respect to future changes in Microsoft licensing terms, access to the information, and provision for needed free public access. People have been realizing that the really important value on their networks is not the hardware and software, but the organizational information, stored in word processing and spreadsheet document files and other formats.

In May 2005 the industry consortium OASIS approved a completely open, published, XML-based standard for document formats called OpenDocument. OpenDocument includes document and template file formats for a full range of document types, such as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and so forth. See the OpenDocument Wikipedia article linked above for a long list of adoptions of ODF by various governments, regions, and localities around the world. The US National Archives have also endorsed OpenDocument.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 and later uses OpenDocument as its default document-file formats.

In May 2006 the ISO defined OpenDocument as ISO 26300.

OpenDocument file extensions system:
• First letter is always O for OpenDocument.
• Second letter is D for Document or T for Template.
• Third letter is document type: T for Text (word processing); S for Spreadsheet; P for Presentation; G for Graphics; H for HTML (or maybe Hypertext); B for dataBase, I guess; F for Formula; and M for Master document.

If you're not seeing interior double borderline styles in this table—one horizontally between the header and the body, and two vertical ones dividing the table into three groups of columns—you might want to get Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Even Internet Explorer version 7 which came out with Windows Vista doesn't handle this correctly yet. IE8 gets it right.

One possible source of confusion: ODF appearing in text is an acronym for OpenDocument Format and refers to the entire standard. When ODF appears as a filename extension (as in Formula2.odf) it identifies an OpenDocument math-formula file, in which case F stands for Formula.

OOo 2+ includes a document converter wizard (File, Wizards, Document Converter) that can do batch conversion to OpenDocument by directory, from the OOo 1.x and Microsoft Office formats. You can choose to convert documents, templates, or both, separately for each document type, and you can also have it recurse subdirectories or not. You can batch-convert word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Microsoft Office) and for OOo 1.x also master documents, but not databases.

I believe the batch converter wizard only converts to OpenDocument. However free OpenOffice.org 2+ can be used to convert back and forth at will, one file at a time, between Microsoft Office formats, the new OpenDocument formats, OOo 1.x formats such as SXW and SXC, and all the other document formats OOo supports, a long list. So if you create a file in OpenDocument format, you can later on convert it to Microsoft Office format.

In some contexts OOo 2+ even gets described as the canonical implementation of OpenDocument. This is no big surprise, because the OOo 1.x formats were also open and XML-based, and were used as the convenient starting point for consortium development of the OpenDocument standard.

If the world standardizes on open document formats, it should not only resolve the access issues but I suspect will also give us all more robust documents.

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OOXML and ODF

XML is a W3C open standard metalanguage used for creating markup languages, data formats, and sometimes websites. HTML and XML are both derivatives of SGML (ISO 8879) an older and more general metalanguage.

Microsoft initially responded to ODF with Office Open XML (OOXML) in Office 2007, their own XML-based document formats, which they represented as addressing access concerns. The short version of the consensus, after wide study of the licensing, seems to have been that in practice it amounted to lip service and FUD, and an attempt to preserve Microsoft control.

I've been predicting since 2005 that eventually Microsoft would stop dragging their feet. In mid-2008 there was word that Office 14 (2010) will support OpenDocument, and in April 2009 Microsoft announced ODF support in Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. It's thought they did it mostly to try to protect sales to people who have to comply with various national, regional, and local government statutory requirements for OpenDocument formats.* See also the April 2009 article Whatever Happened to OOXML? on ComputerworldUK.

There are at least two free third-party solutions for earlier Office versions, to allow organizations to comply with the ODF standard without requiring any users to immediately change software:

OOXML/ODF Translator Add-ins home page http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
OOXML/ODF Translator project page http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

Open-source freeware from the community, for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, in Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 SP1.

Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/

Freeware from Sun Microsystems, for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, in Office 2000, XP, 2003, and Office 2007 SP1.

People immediately wondered if Microsoft's first crack at native ODF support would play nicely with other software that supports ODF, and it looks like there are problems.

IBM, Microsoft quibble over Office 2007's new ODF support (Computerworld, 5/6/09)

It's claimed that Office 2007 SP2 corrupts formulas and data when loading ODF-format spreadsheets created in OOo and other ODF-compliant systems. Microsoft claims it's because they are supporting ODF 1.1, an accepted standard, and everyone else is already supporting ODF 1.2, which hasn't actually been approved by OASIS yet.

Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short (ODF Alliance, 5/19/09)

More-detailed article; describes specific issues, and indicates that Google Docs, KSpread, Symphony, OpenOffice.org, and the open-source and Sun plug-ins for Office are all far more ODF-interoperable than Office 2007 SP2. There's also an indication that Microsoft isn't even supporting ODF 1.1 correctly.

So apparently if you need true ODF interoperability for Microsoft Office users, you need to avoid Office 2007 SP2 if you can. For the many who declined to upgrade from Office 2003 or XP, this is a simple matter of using the open-source or Sun ODF plug-ins instead, until Microsoft does better. They're going to need to do better with Office 14 in 2010, and maybe with an SP3 for Office 2007 a lot sooner, or sales prospects for Office are not good.

Organizations could also simply designate an ODF conversion person, with free OpenOffice.org installed on his or her PC, who uses the OOo conversion wizard to convert MS Office files to OpenDocument format before submission to organizations that require it. The disadvantage here is that the document author may not get to see the results.

Whatever is used to produce ODF files, a memo or intranet page identifying the few Microsoft Office widgets not supported would be in order. This information has been readily available for some time in the OpenOffice.org documentation.

* There's been concern in some circles that Microsoft might be thinking about trying to co-opt ODF. Certainly it needs to be watched, but I'm not sure it would do them much good if they did get control of ODF. It seems to me if that happened, OASIS would just have to meet again and create a new set of open documents standards, called ODF2 maybe.

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File formats controls in OOo

OpenOffice.org 2+ as installed uses OpenDocument/ISO 26300 default document formats (covered above) and lets you override with Save As and save to Microsoft Office and many other formats. Unlike other office suites, OOo gives you total control over its default formats, and whether you see warnings when you save to another format.

In OOo 2+ as installed, every time you save a document to a format other than OpenDocument, such as DOC or XLS, it will pop up an "Are you sure?" dialog with a "Don't show this again" check box.

You can turn this formats "sanity check" warning on and off at will: go to Tools, Options, Load/Save, General, check box: "Warn when not saving in OpenDocument or default format."

On the same General pane you can also specify a different default format for saving new documents, separately for each document type if need be. The initial defaults for all document types are the standard OpenDocument formats, but you also can specify the Microsoft Office document formats, OpenOffice 1.x formats, and many others, including a bunch of document formats I'd never heard of.

When the sanity check warning is turned off, unless you override, OOo saves existing documents to whatever format the document was in when you opened it, without pestering you about it, and saves new documents to the OpenDocument formats, or whatever you specify if you change the defaults.

Here are examples of the combined effect of the two choices:

* OOo settings as installed.

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If you're curious, on my system the OOo default format is OpenDocument, and the warning is off, corresponding to the lower left cell in the table.