Today, March 31, is Document FreeDom Day.
All the IT world is revolving around the Documents. Documents are the carriers of the Information. And when those Documents are in the proprietary format like DOC,XLS,PPT, DocX, XLSX, PPTX, we are bounded to a specific software to open those files – MS Office.
What is the problem in using those file formats?
The documents contain the information. If need the Information, we have to use only that MS Office, which we need to buy.
Thus, they are charging us to get the information from our own files.
This should be changed.
How to change this?
Why all our documents should be slave to a single company?
The answer is “Use Open Document Formats”
What is this?
This is a concept/ method of creating file formats. We call this as ODF.
What is the use?
Yes. These document formats are open. Their specification, structure is open so that any one can build their own application to read/write information from these files.
It is based on XML and It supports text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and other common type of documents. The definition of the format has been done by the OASIS organization, with input from OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and other interested parties; ODF even became an ISO standard!
No need to buy any costly software to just open/read/write a file. Information is free now.
How to use it?
OpenOffice’s default format is ODF only.
Its Writer saves as “odt – open document text“.
Its Spreadsheet saves as “ods – open document spreadsheet“
Its Impress saves as “odp – open document presentation“
If you are using OpenOffice use the above file formats.
Get the OpenOffice for free at http://www.openoffice.org
If you use MS Office, install the ODF Plugin from
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/
Come.
Let us give freedom to the documents.
Going GNU 