Key features of OpenDocument Format

Easy, portable, secure and smart

Probably the most appreciated feature of OpenDocument Format by normal users is that you won't really notice that you are using it. Things should just work as you expect - but it will do so outside of the specific product you've used to create it. And that is new - people have always assumed that their documents looked more or less the same when others viewed them, but reality was harshly different. ODF is not software, it is a well designed and flexible standard to store information in a futureproof and portable way.

"Microsoft has supported ODF, which stands for Open Document Format, since Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and made significant contributions to defining the latest version. Software engineers on the Microsoft Office team provided detailed information about Microsoft Excel's behavior so Excel's formulas will interoperate in the future with other spreadsheet programs that use ODF. And, they contributed to ODF 1.3's security standards, which will make sure you can protect information in your documents."

- Emily Warn on http://blogs.office.com

OpenDocument Format does have a number of properties which make it unique.

ODF is secure - the light-weight structure makes it easier than ever to enforce even the strictest of security policies

equal support for all international scripts - Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Latin, etc

ODF documents are smaller in size than their legacy equivalents, which saves up to 75% of disk space and bandwidth

content as well as media objects (images, movies, etc) are directly accessible and easy to work with from outside your office application

The broadest support of all formats within the industry means that documents are truly portable

ability to add machine processible data to the content of the document to create 'smart documents'

ODF reuses existing standards whereever possible, which makes the standard small, robust, easy and cheap to implement and support

it has a well-defined and concise standard for spreadsheet formulas that gets rid of many legacy bugs known to spreadsheets

the simple XML syntax is human readible and easy to understand and program, even a few lines of Javascript can do the job

ODF pays a lot of attention to accessibility for people with disabilities, and it adheres to the highest possible standards in this area

the underlying document structure is verifiably robust - no more 'corrupt' documents you have to recreate due to unsolvable application errors, just unzip the document and access the content directly

File formats are not your concern

Let the vendor care

File formats are not important to you. Or at least: they shouldn't be. But we've learned from the past that forced updates to a vendor specific file format make you even more dependant on these same vendors, and that such a way of working can disrupt the entire market - inflating prices, hampering innovation and reducing security. File formats should not be part of the marketing approach of vendors, they should just do their job quietly. Which is why you want ODF.

ODF is the new default

In many of the latest versions of Office suites, word processors, spreadsheets and presentation software you work with, ODF is the default format. That means the application fully trusts the file format to be able to capture all of its features. Although it may seem obvious that a standard is not to be relied upon when it is not yet implemented as the default format in any product (if developers don't trust it, why should you), that is a unique feature of ODF compared to other formats such as IS 29500 (OOXML).

That is convenient for users: in fact you do not have even have to do anything special as such applications automatically create new documents directly in OpenDocument Format. This applies for instance to popular and upcoming solutions like OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, LibreOffice and Calligra - all of which have ODF as their default file format. When you install the latest version of Microsoft Office for Windows, you can opt to make ODF your default file format too.

The same applies to online software such as Google Docs and Zoho Office, which also use ODF as a standard. Why would you even consider storing your valuable information in a deprecated file format that was written off by the entire market, including the companies that created them, if you can have a reliable, future-proof and widely supported international standard that is supported by the same products?

If you are using alternative products that support ODF natively next to application specific formats, you just select OpenDocument format when you "save as". You can use one of these solutions to convert existing documents (eg. a .doc file) safely to ODF.

Since the Dutch parliament established an explicit policy on ODF in 2007, adopting the open document format is an important instrument in making government IT more flexible and future-proof, while giving citizens and businesses the freedom to interact with their government using the software they choose.

- Joris Dirks, project lead ODF, 'Netherlands Open in Connection' (NOiV)