GUI presentation software, be it PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, KPresenter or anything else, can be quite time-consuming and distracting.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you to quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into odt (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents.

One of the great advantages of the OpenDocument format is that it is simply a zip file. You can unzip it with any archiver and take a look at the contents (which is a set of XML documents and associated data), change it, re-zip it and you have a new document. But, the OpenDocument Format specification, section has one little extra restriction when it comes to zip containers.

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.

KOfficeSource GmbH will offer professional services around the open source OpenDocument-based KOffice office suite. KOfficeSource GmbH will allow KOffice to be used in companies and organizations that demand high quality support and training for OpenDocument deployment. KOfficeSource GmbH will initially offer the following services to the market: migration and conversion to OpenDocument, consulting around the OpenDocument Format, training on OpenDocument and KOffice, customization of KOffice, custom programming.

OpenDocument, that is: The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format (ODF), which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository.

To speed up ODF recognition Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF.

What if your boss demands a new version of a spreadsheet, with fresh data, every day? Should you enter them manually? No, if your data have a fixed structure and the spreadsheet can be in OpenDocument format (ODF)! If that's the case, it only takes a bit of shell and Perl scripting to generate automatically a new spreadsheet whenever the raw data change.