Five years using OpenDocument.

Solsonic was founded in 2003, and in these 8 years a lot has changed in technology. We started using a fantastic Dell Dimension, where editing videos was in the interphase between pleasure and pain. With time and money we evolved to much more powerful machines, like our beloved first Mac Pro that still serves us daily. But we reached a limit were hardware or software was not the limitation. It was us.

Looking back, one of the most peculiar changes is how we evolve and change tools seamlessly. Almost without noticing your favorite program becomes obsolete, and another free tool becomes your new weapon of choice. But nothing was more surprising than discovering OpenOffice and later Neooffice after many years using the same tired Microsoft Word. OpenOffice was the first suite of programs that did what the original did and more... We were hooked from the start and without a pause promoted the amazing suite to friends and colleagues.

And then, almost in silence, arrived OpenDocument. It was how OpenOffice saved files. "Damn, we have to export it to .doc", or so we thought for a couple of years. But being as lazy as we are, we decided the .doc extension was not worth the hassle of using a drop-down menu. And so Odt files became the new standard in our offices. Spreadsheets with our sales (and sometimes our lack of sales...) were based on OpenDocument. Our scripts were .odt's. Even our presentations were OpenDocument's. They had become a de facto standard... because they worked.

Yes. They worked as we needed them to work. No strange changes in formats. No more incompatibilities between versions. We just love the format and despite some people still cannot use the format, we use it daily in all our operations.

We can only recommend you to do the same. Forget closed formats. Embrace OpenDocument, embrace open standards that just work.

Read more about OpenDocument in Wikipedia