Open Document Formats Mandated by UK Government

The UK Government has mandated the use of Open document formats by all government bodies. The
selected standards are PDF/A and HTML for viewing government documents and Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing documents. ODF is the native format used by the free open source LibreOffice/OpenOffice software package. The Office Open XML format, as used by Microsoft Office, is not one of the formats chosen for use by the UK Government. The Australian Government is unclear as to its preferred files formats. The most advanced agency in use of ODF is National Archives of Australia, who adopted the format for long term storage of government documentsTheir Xena open-source software converts documents from Microsoft formats to ODF.

A quick search showed 83 ODT documents at Gov.au,  265 at Gov.uk and 1450 at Gov (US).

Workaround Opening DOCX Files in LibreOffice Writer

Recently I was marking assignments for a class. I spent hours entering comments into each using the Libre Office "Write" word processor. But when checking my work I found most files contained just one line of text. Searching the web in desperation, I found Bruce Kirkpatrick's "Workaround for bug in LibreOffice Writer when text is lost after saving and reopening docx files" (Mar 03, 2014). Following the instructions I was able to unzip the DOCX file, open the word.xml file with a text editor and delete the hyperlink which caused the problem and re-zip the file. This then opened in Libre Office, whereupon I saved the document in DOC format to avoid further problems. Hopefully Bug 55143  "FILESAVE: LibreOffice corrupting complex documents involving html tags", will be fixed some time soon. But in the interim, I will be saving DOCX files in DOC format to avoid this problem.

Free Office Software for Education in the Cloud

Media reports indicate that the free open source LibreOffice software suite is being ported to run from an on-line server, only needing a HTML5 web browser on the client device. The software is also being ported to Android and iOS operating systems. This could be a useful alternative to Microsoft Office and GoogleDocs, particularly for educational institutions which want to provide students with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, but respect the privacy of the students.

For the last year I have been using LibreOffice. Previously I used OpenOffice, but when I upgraded to a new version of Linux, it came with LibreOffice and have not noticed the difference. The word processor has reasonable compatibility with Microsoft Word, the spreadsheet less so and the presentation tool is not so good (and less compatible with Powerpoint). I have been using OpenOffice/LibreOffice for several years teaching at the tertiary level and it has been adequate.

Having the option to supply the students with free office software which runs in a browser, on a tablet computer and on laptops and desktop computers would be very useful. One issue with cloud based applications is where the data is hosted. If the server is in another country, then there is less control over the data stored. If the educational institution can host the application themselves, or arrange for commercial hosting in the same country, this lessens problems.