Numerous office suites and word processors support the OpenDocument format (ODF). ODF is an open standard for saving and exchanging office documents. The standard has been developed to provide an open alternative to proprietary, for example Microsoft Office, document formats.

In this article we will take a visual tour through different free software editors and examine their core abilities in creating, editing and saving an ODF document. The exercise may on the surface seem trivial, but in reality it has important implications. We demonstrate on a small scale that which may happen in real world situations when a document is shared by different users in multiple environments: home, work, on the road.

Note: If you have a reasonable internet connection then the authors recommend downloading the live CD’s mentioned in the resource section. This will allow you to preview all the software mentioned and experiment with the Gnome and KDE desktop environments.

The Ubuntu live OpenOffice combination

To start the tour let us focus on OpenOffice, a well respected professional office suite. Along with text documents the application also has the ability to save spreadsheets, charts and presentations in ODF. In this article, for the sake of simplicity, we will concentrate on manipulating text documents. Please note, all documents mentioned within this article are contained in a tar file referenced in the resources section.

The recipe: After booting from the Ubuntu live CD (version 5.10), we started up OpenOffice Writer from within the Gnome desktop environment and created a new word processor document. The document contained multiple paragraphs, different headings, various fonts, a table and a picture. We considered the document stereotypical of its type. After finishing writing the document, we saved via selecting Save from the File menu. By default OpenOffice.org loads and saves files in the OpenDocument file format. Notice that the file type has been set to OpenDocument Text (.odt) (shown in figure 1). Further, please note that OpenDocument Spreadsheets are saved with extension .ods, and OpenDocument Presentations as .odp files. We saved the edited document as demo.odt. We plan later to modify the document from within other applications. Due to the fact that we are running from a Live CD we cannot guarantee write access to the hard drive. Therefore we recommend storing file on a USB pen drive. However, on a positive note, the Knoppix live CD (version 4.02) had no troubles guessing type and mounting the windows partitions on my home computer.

Figure 1: Saving a document in OpenDocument Text format with OpenOffice

Slax 5.0.6 with KOffice

Slax, another excellent live CD distribution, is derived from Slackware. We deployed the Standard Edition which employs KDE 3.4 (the K Desktop Environment). The word processor we had available and tested was KWord version 1.4 part of the well regarded KOffice suite.

The recipe: Let us first test if we can now open the previously created document demo.odt in this new environment. Go to the File menu and select Open. The dialog window displays a list of supported filters (file types), but does not display the file type extensions. To open our demo.odt file we point the operating system to the USB stick. First, double click on the System desktop icon, then go to Storage Media. The USB stick gets mounted when you click on the Removable Device icon.

Mounting a USB stick

In KWord .odt files are referred to as OASIS OpenDocument Text.

An aside: OASIS is the originating standards body. OASIS is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards. OASIS has developed many interesting standards spread across a wide spectrum of problem domains. At the University of Amsterdam we provision our premier E-learning environment via XML based communications adhering to OASIS enterprise standards. This group really understands how to write high quality standards for mission critical systems.

When you open the document you will notice that the document looks different from how it was saved in OpenOffice. The picture which was centered is now aligned to the left. Additionally there is extra white space below the image. All these minor changes accumulate into generating a two page document instead of the original single page.

Although the document can be read without problems and all content is available, this is not what you would expect from an open standard for exchanging office files. However, that said, in the short term the software market is rapidly evolving. It would not surprise the authors if the compatibility issue is vastly improved or removed within months.

To continue the roundtrip it is now necessary that we make changes to the demo document. We are now highly motivated to see how other popular word processors handle the document. We now insert an extra paragraph above the picture and centre the picture. The modified document is then saved, by clicking Save from the File menu or pressing Ctrl+S. Now we do not have to specify the file format, because the word processor automatically saves the file to .odt format.

Windows XP with Abiword

An important benefit of standards is the enabling of easy and transparent exchange of data. You are not tied to a specific application or vendor. This interoperability does not just exist on the application level but also on platform level as well. To demonstrate this we open the document created and edited in the previous steps, but now on a Windows platform. For this purpose we use the standalone word processor AbiWord running under Windows XP.