The most common document formats today are Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. If a user received a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document, the user can go to Microsoft website and download Word Viewer, Excel Viewer or PowerPoint Viewer free of charge to open, view, and print the document, but the user will not be able to edit the document, unless the user purchase a copy of the software.

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However, for a Mac user or a Linux user or other non-Windows users, there is no free Word Viewer or Excel Viewer available, in fact, there is no Viewers for operating systems other then Microsoft Windows period.

If the document is a government forms, any citizens wish to access the electronic document are forced to buy and use Microsoft Windows just to view the document. What if Microsoft decides to stop offering the free Word Viewer and Excel Viewer? If editing is needed, again purchasing Microsoft Office is a must. The government is in fact is intentionally or unintentionally forced their citizens to buy Microsoft products.

How about businesses? It might seem natural that commercial companies pay for their Office Productivity software because it is a tool for them conduct businesses.

What if Microsoft decides to raise the price of their essential Word and Excel programs? What if Microsoft go bankrupt or disappear all together tomorrow (famous reputable big companies do go bankrupt and disappear, remember Pam Am and Lehman Brothers)? Would the secrets of the formats disappear too?

The Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats are almost the de facto document standards at the moment. However, these standards are made by, supplied by and ruled by one company. If this one company decides to change its standards or if anything happens to this one company, would we still be able to read our documents 10, 20, 50 years from now?

That is why we need Free Document Formats and Open Standards. When formats of documents are standardized in an open formats, any software maker can learn those details and make an application that can open, read, print and edit those documents. The software application can be commercial or non-commercial. Users have the power to choose what their need. And because the formats are open, people are able to create software for the formats even 100 years from now.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is to promote the use of Free Document Formats and Open Standards.

Complementary to Software Freedom Day, DFD aims to have local teams all over the world organize events on the last Wednesday of March. This is the third year that Document Freedom Day, the first year was on 26th March 2008. The DFD organizer is again looking for people around the world to join their effort this year.

DFD's main goals are:

• promotion and adoption of free document formats
• forming a global network
• coordination of activities that happen on last Wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day

Once a year, DFD organizer will celebrate Document Freedom Day as a global community. Between those days, DFD organizer will be focused on facilitating community action and building awareness for issues of Document Freedom and Open Standards. DFD organizer hopes that more people will join the DFD community.

Who's behind DFD?

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is organized with help of many different players. It is a community effort that DFD organizer put together every year.

All of them will help DFD organizer to get the word out on DFD 2010, be it by publishing articles about Open Standards, publicizing the campaign, writing posts for the DFD blog, or simply helping DFD by putting the campaign icon on their websites.

Document Freedom Day's success is also based on the commitment of teams of volunteers worldwide.

There are many ways to take part on this campaign:

• Put a banner in your websites, linking to DFD website. There are artworks and banners available in DFD Artwork2010 page.
• Publish a blog post on Document Freedom Day, or Open Standards, and spread the word about the campaign. Send DFD a link, and they will include it in the DFD website.
• Use microblog to spread DFD news and articles. Tag them using !dfd or #dfd2010
• Organize an activity in your city on March 31st. For ideas on activities, check the Document Freedom Day website.
• Donate money to DFD.
• Become a partner organization. Contact Campaign Team on how to do that.

The Document Freedom Day web site is currently hosted by Free Software Foundation Europe.

Open Standards and Open Documents?

Open Standards allow people to share all kinds of data freely and with perfect fidelity. They prevent lock-in and other artificial barriers to interoperability, and promote choice between vendors and technology solutions. There are many legal definitions and/or interpretation of the term Open Standards in different organizations and countries. The basic ideas is that with Open Standards, users are able to:

• choose any operating system or application and still be able to read and edit all old documents.
• collaborate with others regardless of which software they are using.
• use any software of choice to interact with your government.

Open Standards can lead to:

• more competition in software, resulting in better pricing and service
• increased competition in hardware, meaning more innovative and cost-effective solutions
• lower taxes as a result of more effective governmental IT solutions that avoid the cost of lock-in

OpenDocument Format (ODF)

As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is a growing problem that governments and their constituents and businesses may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. To enable the public and private sectors to have greater control over and direct management of their own records, information and documents, OpenDocument Format (ODF) is being promoted to be the primary document format for governments and businesses.

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (also known as OpenDocument or ODF) is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. While the specifications were originally developed by Sun Microsystems, the standard was developed by the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC - OASIS ODF TC, committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based on the XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite. In addition to being an OASIS standard, it is published (in one of its version 1.0 manifestations) as an ISO/IEC international standard, ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

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1. Alliance Applauds Edmonton’s Move to Open Standard Document Formats
2. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 is now available for download
3. Microsoft Office Add-in for Moodle Released

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Download OpenOffice.org for Windows operating system :
Chinese (traditional) 正體中文版 3.2.0
Chinese (simplified) 简体中文版 3.2.0
English (US) 美国英文版 3.2.0
For other operating systems and languages, please go to the OpenOffice.org download page.

Updated (26Feb2010):
OpenOffice.org Portable 3.2.0 from PortableApps.com is also available for download now:
Chinese (traditional) 正體中文版 3.2.0
Chinese (simplified) 简体中文版 3.2.0
English (US) 美国英文版 3.2.0

The PortableApps.com project is a compilation of freeware, free and open source portable software for Windows. Software can be download onto our portable devices such as USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

Related posts:

1. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 is now available for download
2. PortableApps.com Ends Windows 95/98/Me Support
3. Free Japanese style OpenOffice.org templates

The other appeal of OpenOffice.org is its offering of its office productivity suite in many platforms and languages.

With the products popularity, users are also asking for ever more extensions and templates.

OpenOffice.org official website also has a free templates hosting service.

Templates site also has sections for many different languages.

For example, for Japanese users, there are over 60 templates in OpenOffice.org Templates Japanese section, with the majority being presentation background for OpenOffice.org Impress.

Japan TemplateBANK now also offers over one hundred free OpenOffice.org templates, including business cards (20), fax (20), greeting cards (59), moving notice cards (6), school enrollment and graduation cards (10).

These are Japanese style documents and cards, But many of the cards do have universal appeal to all cultures, some are really cute.

The templates offered by TemplateBANK are free for personal use for “Free Membership”, registration required.

Related posts:

1. Oracle Reiterates Its Continue Development And Support Of OpenOffice.org.
2. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 is now available for download
3. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 Chinese Version Is Now Available For Download

OpenOffice.org 3.2 New Features:

General Improvements

Faster start up times

OpenOffice.org 3.2 Calc and Writer have both reduced ‘cold start’ time by 46% since version 3.0 was released just over a year ago (results will vary on different operating systems and hardware).

ODF Support

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is now more compliance with ODF 1.2, including closer conformance to OASIS ODFF/OpenFormula specifications.

* As OpenOffice.org 3.2 currently requires a superset of the ODF 1.2 specification, the software now warns users when ODF 1.2 Extended features have been used.

* The document integrity check now proves whether an ODF document conforms to the ODF specification (this mainly affects ODF 1.2 documents). If an inconsistency is found, the document is treated as a broken one, and OpenOffice.org offers to repair the document.

Proprietary File Support

OpenOffice.org 3.2 provides improved support for other common office document types.

* Password protected Microsoft Office XML files (supported document types: MS Word 2007 documents (*.docx, *.docm); MS Word 2007 templates (*.dotx, *.dotm); MS Excel 2007 documents (*.xlsx, *.xlsm); MS Excel 2007 binary documents (*.xlsb); MS Excel 2007 templates (*.xltx, *.xltm); MS Powerpoint 2007 documents (*.pptx, *.pptm); MS Powerpoint 2007 templates (*.potx, *.potm)).

* OLE objects, form controls and pivot tables can now be read from MS Excel 2007 documents (*.xlsx, *.xlsb).

* Encryption support within the Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP filter allows password protected Microsoft Word documents to be saved (using the Microsoft Office standard RC4 algorithm).

* Filters for AportisDoc and PocketWord now support type detection based on DocType. As a result, files in these formats can be loaded without explicitly selecting the document type in the file picker.

* When writing string data to SYLK files, embedded double quotes are no longer escaped by doubling; semicolons are now escaped by doubling. This improves compatibility with files created by other applications.

Support for Postscript based OpenType fonts

There are many high quality commercial and free OpenType fonts that are based on Postscript outlines. They are now supported for formatting, printing, PDF-export and display.

Writer

Mediawiki support moved to an Extension, to avoid conflicts.

Calc

Cell borders now support multiple selection

Previously it was only possible to apply cell borders to a single rectangular cell range. Now borders can be applied to any selection of cells.

Autofill now handles additional cases

If the starting cell for AutoFill contains a number at the start and the end, and there’s no space after the first number, the number at the end is now incremented. This allows easier creation of things like lists of IP addresses (10.0.0.1 is followed by 10.0.0.2).

Improvements to sort

If “Sort” is invoked with a selection that is likely not to be the range the user wants to address, a new dialog will ask if the selection should be extended to contain the additional cells.

When a cell range is sorted using the “Sort Ascending” or “Sort Descending” toolbar button, cell formats are now sorted with the cells.

Better handling of merged cells

Merged cells can now be pasted from the clipboard onto other merged cells.

Inserting or deleting cells, columns or rows into/from the middle of merged cells, which previously caused an error message, is now possible. The merged cell range is enlarged/reduced.

Complex copy and paste

Enhancements to statistical functions

Preservation of newline characters in formulas

Numeric conversion in strings

Additional functionality in filters

Many new factors in CONVERT_ADD

Calc convert_addThe CONVERT_ADD spreadsheet function (known as CONVERT in other applications) has many more conversion factors implemented, as defined in OASIS ODFF/OpenFormula.

New UNICODE and UNICHAR functions

Draw

New style comments

Page Count added to Draw

Impress

New style comments

Page Count added to Impress

Math

Change to Math menus

Base

Customizing the Create Database Wizard

Simpler copying of queries between database documents

Database forms can be zoomed

More intelligent import into Base

Chart

New Chart types

Usability improvements in Chart

Enhancements to data labels

Asian typography page for chart elements

Internationalization and Localizations

New Locale support

OpenOffice.org 3.2 adds locale data for Oromo_Ethiopia [om-ET], Uyghur_China [ug-CN], Ancient Greek [grc-GR], Somali_Somalia [so-SO], Sorbian, Lower [dsb-DE] and Upper [hsb-DE, Asturian_Spain [ast-ES], Yiddish_Israel [yi-IL], Arabic (Oman) [ar-OM], Sardinian_Italy [sc-IT, and Quechua (Ecuador) [qu-EC].

Japanese Name Order

In a Japanese Locale the order of the FirstName / LastName fields in the user data tabpage is reversed.

Support for Graphite font technology

OpenOffice.org now supports Graphite font technology for better support of scripts and variants used by minorities.

Related posts:

1. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 Chinese Version Is Now Available For Download
2. Free Japanese style OpenOffice.org templates
3. Oracle Reiterates Its Continue Development And Support Of OpenOffice.org.

After the completion of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle lay down its office productivity products strategy.

A web cast by Michael Bemmer (GM, Oracle Office Global Business Unit), reiterate that OpenOffice.org will remain an open source application and Oracle will remain the main contributor of the community. There will also be web based office suite which can be integrated into the desktop version.

However, StarOffice or StarSuite (StarOffice with Asian languages supports) will get a name change.

Oracle + Sun Product Strategy Webcast Series: OpenOffice (4 min.)

Related posts:

1. Free Japanese style OpenOffice.org templates
2. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 is now available for download
3. OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 Chinese Version Is Now Available For Download