OpenDocument as Standard?

California is looking to follow in the footsteps of Massachusetts in making the OpenDocument Format the official standard for state agencies, reports CNET.

After I got locked out of MS Word for Mac recently (I won’t comment on this), I switched to NeoOffice, the native Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.

My switching to NeoOffice left me a little worried, for most of the rest of the world still uses the proprietary MS Word formats.

Though OpenOffice does a pretty good job of converting MS Word (.doc) to to OpenDocument Text (.odt) format, it’s not foolproof, and some formatting (especially the more obscure ones) may be lost or altered.

After reading about California looking to move to the OpenDocument as an official standard, and knowing that the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) has already switched to OpenOffice as their standard, I felt a little better — I was in good company.

I will now stake my reputation in the IT world in saying that within 3 years, as many people will be using the OpenDocument formats as there are using the proprietary MS Office formats.

So why not come join me in shaping the landscape of computing?