OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications

If you ask me, one of the widely used software at any time - if you discount the web browser and the text editor - would be a word processor. A word processor is an integral part of any office setup and plays a significant role in its day to day affairs. And there are a plethora of word processors around from the proprietary ones like Ms-Word and WordPerfect to open source ones like OpenOffice and Abiword.

But all these applications (baring the open source ones) encourage their users in saving the files in their own unique file formats. This is because the application whose file format is most widely used will rule the word processor market as the users are inadvertently tied down to using that application and will find it hard to switch to another. Going by this trend, Microsoft Word has come up as the most widely used word processor stifling its competition to such an extent that its one time competitor WordPerfect is nowhere on the scene.

So a need was felt in various quarters to develop and promote an open file format for saving office documents which any word processing application can read and write to flawlessly. And the end result of this is the formation of a group called OASIS which created an open file format called the Open Document Format (ODF) for office applications. This office format has gained a lot of publicity in recent times with the Massachusetts state in the USA decreeing that all the documents created and saved by state employees will have to be based on open formats. And they went on to specify two formats which meet their requirements which is the OASIS ODF and Adobe's PDF.

Open Document Format (ODF) is an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications and this format can be used to read and write office documents such as spread sheets, presentations, memos, letters and charts. The OpenOffice ver 2.0 supports this format by default. What is interesting is that with this file format specification gaining more and more takers, it will only be a matter of time before it becomes the de facto standard for saving documents created in office applications irrespective of which application is used to create the document.

It is worth noting that the ODF has already been approved as an international standard by ISO (International Standards Organization). And considering that Microsoft stands to lose a lot in the rising popularity of ODF, they have been trying to promote their own open file standard called OpenXML which they claim have much more features than its counterpart. And recently bowing to the pressures that be, they have decided to create a plug-in which allows users of MS Office suite to convert their files to and from ODT to OpenXML and vice versa.

This war over file formats can be compared to those fought in the past between VHS and Betamax video formats or the more recent BlueRay vs HD DVD. Either way, it is the users of the office suites who stand to gain in the adoption of open standards in file formats and in my opinion, ODF stands out over OpenXML in terms of popularity and its openness.