Open Document Format updated to fix spreadsheets

A major change to the Open Document Foundation (ODF) spec to improve spreadsheet functionality has been ratified by standards chiefs.

OASIS has voted to approve ODF 1.2, which the group claims now offers "a 100 per cent bug free and reliable, cross-product spreadsheet formula syntax". Change tracking has also been improved.

ODF was last updated in 2006 but had a number of bugs in the spreadsheet module. ODF 1.2 saw a completely new spreadsheet module written.

By improving the spreadsheet it'll be hoped that all the Office-like suites that use ODF will see more uptake among organizations that had held off out of fear that bugs would trample their delicate data.

The XML document format is used in OpenOffice and, now, the OpenOffice fork Libre Office, IBM's Lotus Symphony, Google Docs and Zoho Office among other desktop and online suites.

Also added in ODF 1.2 is an RDF metadata framework for the exchange of data on the web. ®