The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution.

Sun has released the final version of its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office, designed to allow the ODF standard to better compete with Microsoft's dominant Office formats.

Okay, lets get one thing straight… Repeat after me: “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format”!

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

Ever since Open Document Format was standardized by ISO and Microsoft started pushing its own “open” format a significant portion of the Free Software community has been buzzing about how bloated, not really open and ultimately redundant Microsoft’s format is and moreover how Microsoft is using various “dirty tricks” to get its format approved as an open standard.

Massachusetts' open formats policy is off to a slow start with only 250 of the government's 50,000 PCs outfitted with the necessary technology. Since the policy was publicly introduced last year, the plan has seen resistance from state employees and Microsoft, lobbying heavily against the format change.

HE GROUP set up to push the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support of that file format.