Posted on by Simon Phipps

I’m in Latvia today speaking at the Latvian Open Technology Association annual conference – my slides are online. The speaker before me was from the government and made an important announcement; that from now on, all government departments in Latvia must accept documents in ODF.

It’s not just Latvia. Moves like this are in progress across Europe as public administrations seek to ensure citizens can engage with government without being forced to pay for the means to do so. All the same, many citizens will want to use software other than LibreOffice to edit ODF documents.

So I remain surprised that neither Apple nor Google are taking ODF support seriously. Apple still don’t support ODF in their applications (despite it being available in their TextEdit gadget on Mac OS X) or the iPhone or iPad, and the ODF support in Google Docs is so weak that documents I try to upload from LibreOffice are routinely rejected in ODF and yet accepted if I save the identical document in .doc format. It’s ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is from Microsoft.

Filed under: ODF |