This may be already a stale news, but I’ll post it anyway. OpenDocument recently was approved as international standard (ISO/IEC 26300), hooray. For you information, OpenDocument is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, databases, charts, and presentations.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular but undocumented DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office, as well as Microsoft Office Open XML format.
In a nutshell, everybody is free to implement OpenDocument (ODF) support, and users will not be locked out by a single vendor as in case with proprietary office format like Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite.
Currently the most popular applications that support OpenDocument is < a href="http://openoffice.org">OpenOffice (supported on a number of operating systems), Abiword and KOffice.
Visit OpenOffice Wikipedia entry for more information about OpenDocument Format