03 October 2011, 10:48

ODF 1.2 includes new spreadsheet standardisation

ODF logo An official announcement has yet to be made, but on a mailing list of the OASIS group, Chet Ensign, Director of Standards Development, announced that ODF 1.2 has been approved. ODF 1.2, Open Document Format for Office Applications, was last updated four years ago in Feb 2007 with the approval of ODF 1.1.

The biggest changes in ODF 1.2, according to ODF architect Rob Wier, is the introduction of OpenFormula, support for RDF/RDFa XML metadata formats and the addition of digital signature support. OpenFormula defines, for the first time in ODF, the format of spreadsheet formulas. The lack of a specification in earlier versions had caused problems with interoperability between different implementations of ODF 1.0 and 1.1 spreadsheets. ODF 1.2's OpenFormula should provide a standard way for any program to exchange formula definitions.

ODF is one of the ISO standardised formats for office applications and is implemented in the open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice. ODF is an XML-based format which saves data and display attributes in a standard way, within an XML file.

(djwm)

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