OpenDocument


OpenDocument Format 'for Office Applications, also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300', is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed with the aim of providing an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
The standard is developed and maintained by a technical committee in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards consortium. It was based on the Sun Microsystems specification for OpenOffice.org XML, the default format for OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. It was originally developed for StarOffice "to provide an open standard for office documents."
In addition to being an OASIS standard, it is published as an ISO/IEC international standard ISO/IEC 26300 Open Document Format for Office Applications. From March 2024, the current version is 1.4.

Specifications

The most common filename extensions used for OpenDocument documents are:
  • .odt and .fodt for word processing documents
  • .ods and .fods for spreadsheets
  • .odp and .fodp for presentations
  • .odg and .fodg for graphics
  • .odf for formulae, mathematical equations
The original OpenDocument format consists of an XML document that has as its root element. OpenDocument files can also take the format of a ZIP compressed archive containing a number of files and directories; these can contain binary content and benefit from ZIP's lossless compression to reduce file size. OpenDocument benefits from separation of concerns by separating the content, styles, metadata, and application settings into four separate XML files.
There is a comprehensive set of example documents in OpenDocument format available. The whole test suite is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

History

Conception

The OpenDocument standard was developed by a Technical Committee under the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards industry consortium. The ODF-TC has members from a diverse set of companies and individuals. Active TC members have voting rights. Members associated with Sun and IBM have sometimes had a large voting influence. The standardization process involved the developers of many office suites or related document systems.
The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was 16 December 2002. OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS standard on 1 May 2005. OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on 16 November 2005, under Publicly Available Specification rules. ISO/IEC standardization for an open document standard including text, spreadsheet and presentation was proposed for the first time in DKUUG 28 August 2001.
After a six-month review period, on 3 May 2006, OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC 1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was "approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard" under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006.
After responding to all written ballot comments, and a 30-day default ballot, the OpenDocument international standard went to publication in ISO, officially published 30 November 2006.
In 2006, Garry Edwards, a member of OASIS TC since 2002, along with Sam Hiser and Paul "Marbux" E. Merrell founded the OpenDocument Foundation. The aim of this project was to be open-source representative of the format in OASIS. The immediate aim of this project was to develop software that would convert legacy Microsoft Office documents to ODF. By October 2007 the project was a failure: Conversion of Microsoft Office documents could not be achieved. By this time, The foundation was convinced that ODF was not moving in a direction that they supported. As a result, it announced the decision to abandon its namesake format in favor of W3C's Compound Document Format, which was in early stages of its development. The foundation, however, never acted on this decision and was soon dissolved. The CDF was never designed for this purpose either.

Further standardization

Further standardization work with OpenDocument includes:
  • The OASIS Committee Specification corresponds to the published ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard. The content of ISO/IEC 26300 and OASIS OpenDocument v1.0 2nd ed. is identical. It includes the editorial changes made to address JTC1 ballot comments. It is available in ODF, HTML and PDF formats.
  • ' includes additional features to address accessibility concerns. It was approved as an OASIS Standard on 2007-02-01 following a call for vote issued on 2007-01-16. The public announcement was made on 2007-02-13. This version was not initially submitted to ISO/IEC, because it is considered to be a minor update to ODF 1.0 only, and OASIS were working already on ODF 1.2 at the time ODF 1.1 was approved. However it was later submitted to ISO/IEC and published in March 2012 as "ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012 – Open Document Format for Office Applications v1.1".
  • ' includes additional accessibility features, RDF-based metadata, a spreadsheet formula specification based on OpenFormula, support for digital signatures and some features suggested by the public. It consists of three parts: Part 1: OpenDocument Schema, Part 2: Recalculated Formula Format and Part 3: Packages. Version 1.2 of the specification was approved as an OASIS Standard on 29 September 2011. It was submitted to the relevant ISO committee under the Publicly Available Specification procedure in March 2014. In October 2014, it was unanimously approved as a Draft International Standard. Some comments were raised in the process that needed to be addressed before OpenDocument 1.2 could proceed to become an International Standard. OpenDocument 1.2 was published as ISO/IEC standard on 17 June 2015.
  • includes additional features for digital signatures, encryption, change-tracking and inter-operability. Version 1.3 of the OpenDocument specification was approved as an OASIS Standard April 2021. The specification was completed as the result of the COSM crowdfunding project seeded by The Document Foundation.

    Application support

Software

The OpenDocument format is used in free software and in proprietary software. This includes office suites and individual applications such as word-processors, spreadsheets, presentation, and data management applications. Prominent text editors, word processors and office suites supporting OpenDocument fully or partially include:
Various organizations have announced development of conversion software to support OpenDocument on Microsoft's products., there are nine packages of conversion software. Microsoft first released support for the OpenDocument Format in Office 2007 SP2. However, the implementation faced substantial criticism and the ODF Alliance and others claimed that the third party plugins provided better support. Microsoft Office 2010 can open and save OpenDocument Format documents natively, although not all features are supported. In July 2024, Microsoft announced early support for ODF 1.4 in Microsoft 365, starting with version 2404 for Windows and 16.84 for macOS.
Starting with Mac OS X 10.5, the TextEdit application and Quick Look preview feature support the OpenDocument Text format.

Accessibility

Licensing

Public access to the standard

Versions of the OpenDocument Format approved by OASIS are available for free download and use. The ITTF has added ISO/IEC 26300 to its "list of freely available standards"; anyone may download and use this standard free-of-charge under the terms of a click-through license.

Additional royalty-free licensing

Obligated members of the OASIS ODF TC have agreed to make deliverables available to implementors under the OASIS Royalty Free with Limited Terms .
Key contributor Sun Microsystems made an irrevocable intellectual property covenant, providing all implementers with the guarantee that Sun will not seek to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the OpenDocument specification in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation.
A second contributor to ODF development, IBM – which, for instance, has contributed Lotus spreadsheet documentation – has made their patent rights available through their Interoperability Specifications Pledge in which "IBM irrevocably covenants to you that it will not assert any Necessary Claims against you for your making, using, importing, selling, or offering for sale Covered Implementations."
The Software Freedom Law Center has whether there are any legal barriers to the use of the OpenDocument Format in free and open source software arising from the standardization process. In their opinion ODF is free of legal encumbrances that would prevent its use in free and open source software, as distributed under licenses authored by Apache and the FSF.