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The International Organization for Standardization, which oversees files formats and other standards information, [published the official specs for the Open Document Format][1] last week. The ODF file format is an XML-based format for text, spreadsheet, database, and presentation files created by office applications.
The idea behind ODF is to provide a way for any office program on any platform to share documents with any other office program. OpenOffice.org already saves files in ODF format and Google's web-based office apps support it as well.
Even Microsoft has grudgingly acknowledged the format and plans to release plugins for MS Office 2007 which will allow users to read and write ODF files.
In related news, Novell has announced that its version of OpenOffice.org [will support Microsoft's proprietary document format][2], the confusingly named Open XML (which is not "open" in sense of open source as its name might imply).
Novell also plans to release the code to the open source community so that all versions of OpenOffice.org *could* support the MS format if they wanted.
While it would be nice to see Microsoft adopt the ODF file format for MS Office, at least for the time being the Novel announcement means OpenOffice.org users will be able to trade documents with MS Office users.
Even if Microsoft never moves to using the ODF format by default, these two announcements are still a win for users as enhanced cross-platform capabilities will benefit nearly everyone.
The new version of Novell's OpenOffice.org does not have an official release date yet. Office 2007 [will be available to consumers January 30th][3].
[1]: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485&scopelist=PROGRAMME "ISO ODF docs"
[3]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/windows_vista_i.html "Monkey Bites on Office 2007 release dates"
[2]: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061205/tc_pcworld/128079 "Novell to support Open XML format"
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