Campaign for OpenDocument Format (ODF)

Welcome to anyofficesuite.org. This site is an independent campaign for OpenDocument Format (ODF).

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

The World Wide Web was born more than a decade ago. Fortunately, the "this page is best viewed in Browser X" label is rarely seen nowadays. The web designers have learned and adopted the browser independent standards. All major web pages are viewable with any browser thanks to the ongoing development of W3C standards, compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari and the anybrowser.org campaign. However, many office documents are still "best viewed" in a specific word processor.

I want to change this. I have placed the "Any Office Suite" button on my web site and my documents are all saved as ODF. But I need your support - I can't do it myself. Please put a button on your website and save as ODF when you share your documents with others.

OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) is designed as an independent file format for office applications. The standard is a already supported by a lot of software, platforms and vendors thanks to the open collaborative effort put into the design of ODF. I can read and write ODF documents in any office suite compliant with the standard.

Therefore, I find it increasingly annoying that people send me Word documents and expect me to read this proprietary file format. And when I browse the web I find office documents that are "best viewed in Office X". Microsoft are now pushing a XML version of the old proprietary formats for Microsoft Office (.doc, .xls and .ppt) as an open standard. I am against using Microsoft Office Open XML because Microsoft Office Open XML is designed for a single application from a single vendor. Furthermore, Microsoft still does not offer native support for ODF documents in their products.

ODF is designed and developed independently of old proprietary file formats in order to support the features in many applications (including Microsoft Office). Furthermore, the development of ODF is ongoing in order to meet future needs.

I invite everyone to join this campaign. Go ahead and copy the button to your website and use the example letters to inform others. Take a look at the links and feel free to send feedback, suggestions, design for buttons and letters.

Thanks!