Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

In March, the UK Government announced its Open Document Format (ODF) guidance and chose ODF as its standard.

The UK government has selected ODF as the standard for editable office documents to be used across government.

I think this is good news as it will presumably bring a lot of weight (and maybe even some money!) behind the ODF format and making sure it works properly. The web site mentions Open Document Format (ODF): validators and compliance testing which we may find useful to diagnose problems with files.

This is excellent news! As some know, the national broadcaster in Norway made this move back in 2010 (article on NRK, article from Linux Magazine) in order to fulfill requirements from the government, which states that all public communication is to be done primarily through HTML/XHTML standards, and secondarily through PDF or ODF.

Also, it saves them a bucketload of money… With a government as large and powerful as the British, maybe we’ll finally see some serious financial backing for the further development of the software. Speaking of which, do anyone know anything about any new versions of OpenOffice? It’s been quite some time now on version 4.1.1.

There is a version 4.1.2 in preparation, but it merely contains some fixes and some extra languages.

Good news, I'd say.

Of course, a requirement for ODF is not a requirement for OO/LibO. MS Office "supports" ODF as well.

Whether this kind of decision will actually improve the quality of ODF support in MS Office, we can only hope. My suspicion is that any format they don't control will always be second class.

It would be fantastic if this translated into some kind of increased monetary support for OO/LibO. LibO is swimming along but OO seems to be barely treading water.

acknak wrote: LibO is swimming along but OO seems to be barely treading water.

I hope some other company will replace the Microsoft-sponsored Apache Software Foundation.
Open Office now is in the worst condition ever thanks to the ASF.

yay

Anyway, it's good that our government have decided to use the ODF system since Microsoft Office format is a pain to convert to other suites and the programme itself really is bad. OOo is far better in terms of compatibility and usability.