An introduction to open formats

Have you ever had trouble opening a document that someone sent you? Have you ever bought a copy of MS Office that you didn't want because you have to read documents that only work with that version of MS Office? Have you ever wondered why there is so little choice in office software?

What you are seeing is vendor lock-in. It happens because your documents are written in a secret format that only one software maker knows. This prevents competitors from making products that can read and write those files well. In short, it reduces your choices down to one.

Vendor lock-in is the enemy of competition. It short-circuits the market forces that would normally give you better products at a lower cost. OpenDocument is a way out of vendor lock-in for office software.

• What if you could send a file to anyone and know that they can read it?
• What if you could buy any product you want and know that you can still communicate with your customers?

This is the promise of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open, XML-based file format for office documents. It includes text documents, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations and more. OpenDocument is freely available for any software maker to use and implement and does not favor any vendor over all the others.

What's the deal with open standards?

• When you visit a website, do you need to know what software that website runs to create the web page?
• When you send an email, do you need to know what email client your friend has?

Then why should it be different for your documents? You should be able to send your documents to your customers without knowing what office software they run and be confident that it would work.

Open standards are everywhere

• When you buy a music CD you know it will fit in your CD player.
• When you buy canned food, you know it will work with your can opener.
• When you buy a toaster, you know it will work with the power plugs in your house.

Thanks to open standards, we can have a plethora of products in the market. They compete with each other for your business, which means that they must give you a better product for a lower cost. 

Open and free are NOT the same

To avoid confusion, we are talking here about open standards, that has something to do with the file format you save your documents in. It does not say that the software you are using to make your document is open source or free (gratis).

Open standard means, that the specification that tells how your document is formatted is open to anyone at reasonable costs. So that everyone is able to write software or plug-in to handle your document.

What are file formats?

Whenever you save files on your computer you are using some sort of file format. Usually you can recognize a file format by its extension. For example a plain text file has the extension .txt.

Most of us don't use plain text files anymore, since they lack the ability to format text or insert pictures. The plain text file has one big advantage though, twenty years from now you are still able to read the contents of your file AND it doesn't require expensive software or expert companies to do so.

The reason why you can read the text file in the far future is that the way it is stored on your disk is standardized and that the standard itself is open and freely available to anyone (open standard).

What is the OpenDocument Format?

There is already a file format that is open, freely available and that can handle pretty much everything in formatting (like this leaflet). Beside the format is able to store your electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.

The source of some documents to show their document format
Hieroglyphs: Papyrus of Ani	Binary Word document (.doc)	XML based document (.odt) Open Document Format

Why should you care?

The Egyptians in ancient Egypt where ahead of their time, and invented a quite decent language and used hieroglyphs for their written communication.

That worked fine for them, there were no machines around and people didn't mind if interpretation of a text took some time.

But clearly, 2000 years later it took a big effort from archaeologists to interpret the language. It may sound strange to you but there is an obvious parallel between the hieroglyphs and closed-document formats.


A lot of people and companies save their electronic office documents in the .doc or .docx file format. To date there is only one company in the world that knows how the information of your document is stored in that particular format.

The question is, do you feel save knowing only one company knows how your document is stored? Will you be able to read your document 10 years from now? And if so what will that cost?

Not to mention if you wish to open your file NOW on different hardware. Like a pda, cellphone or 128bit computer. Or a different operating system...

The answer is: you probably end up with some hieroglyphs!

Don't end up in hieroglyphs, practical tips

If you or your organization sees the benefits of saving files in open formats, you can contact PowerCraft Technology for more help or visit the OpenOffice website.  OpenOffice is a comprehensive electronics office suite that uses ODF to save your spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.

If you are not able to switch to other electronic office software. DO take the effort to safe your documents in other formats as well. Doing so will make it more likely that you are able to read your documents in the future.

• Saving as PDF is a good way to start.
  Under Unix like systems install the cups/pdf printer.
  Under Windows you can  use PDF creator.
   
  
• Use the Sun ODF plugin for MS Office to save your documents in ODF from MS Office.

You are not alone!

Now when you read all this, you may think “I am not going to use this, being the only one”. Well I can tell you, you're not.

Along with our company PowerCraft Technology there are a lot of governments and companies working with the OpenDocument Format- because WE CARE!

Some governments currently working on or supporting the OpenDocument format include: Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK, South Africa.

Some examples of companies currently supporting the adoption of the OpenDocument format are Adobe, Corel, IBM and Sun.


ing. Barry de Graaff (B. Eng)
Technical Consultant at PowerCraft Technology




First three paragraphs are written by the OpenDocument Fellowship and used here under terms of the Creative Commons License (Attribution) this license is similar to my terms of use.

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