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Introducing OpenDocument

Become acquainted with OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF)

Uche Ogbuji (uche@ogbuji.net), Partner, Zepheira, LLC

Uche Ogbuji is a partner at Zepheira, LLC, a solutions firm specializing in the next generation of Web technologies. Mr. Ogbuji is lead developer of 4Suite, an open source platform for XML, RDF, and knowledge-management applications, and lead developer of the Versa RDF query language. He is a computer engineer and writer born in Nigeria, living and working in Boulder, Colorado. You can find more about Mr. Ogbuji at his Weblog, Copia.

Summary: The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is an XML standard that lets you store and exchange office application documents, including word-processor, spreadsheet, and presentation files. Whether you try to perform special tasks on files saved from such applications or work on applications to process such files, you should become familiar with this important format. Learn about the two possible forms of OpenDocument files, as multipart packages and as single XML documents, and learn how to structure text and tabular information in OpenDocument.

Date: 22 Jul 2008 (Published 08 Apr 2008)
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (239 KB)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 13312 views
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Summary

Wrapping up

ODF is an open specification supported by a strong community of players. It provides flexibility to users of some of the most important computer applications. The developers of this mature standard followed a careful process when they design it, and took advantage of developments in related specifications. In September, 2007 another important player joined the cause as IBM announced ODF support for the Lotus Symphony application suite, covering documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

People communicate through office documents, so management of text is paramount. In this tutorial, you saw how to represent text simply in ODF, and got a small taste of how richly you can enhance text where necessary. Spreadsheets are a long-established tool for management, and in this tutorial you saw how to start with simple HTML tables, and turn these into tables of text, and then tables for a spreadsheet. In general this is a good sequence for starting easy with ODF, and then filling in the more sophisticated constructs. Think of what you can do in HTML, and experiment with simple documents that are mere shallow translations of HTML documents, and then gradually expand using ODF-specific features. One good way to discover these features is to play with your experimental documents in an office application, and then check out the results in the saved file. That's the power of an open application format that looks to other standards for reuse opportunities. If you develop applications for text processing, spreadsheets, presentations, or drawings, consider ODF for your on-disk file format.

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