Why and how the OpenDocument format can save you a lot of time!

[ Thanks to M. Fioretti for this link. ]

"The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an internationally recognized open standard for digital office documents whose importance has also been acknowledged by Microsoft. ODF is good for a lot of reasons I have already explained in Everybody's Guide to OpenDocument. However, there is also one more reason why ODF is great for everybody who must produce a lot of office documents, one that will be the subjects of many posts on this website: ODF is really simple to generate or edit automatically. Even if you aren't a professional programmer, it takes very little effort to put together a script that generates or processes in any way texts, presentations or spreadshets in ODF format.

"How the openness of ODF makes automatic generation of documents much simpler

"Very often, we use computers to produce many different versions, every time with new data, of some reference text, presentation or spreadsheet. Changing those kind of files manually makes sense only if it happens once in a while. When it's a regular activity, instead, it can become a huge waste of time. ODF, however, makes it very quick and easy to insert raw data into texts, spreadsheets or presentations with the slightest possible amount of manual work and without even running OpenOffice. This is possible because an ODF file is just a ZIP archive, with pictures and macros in their own folders and the actual text written, in XML format, inside a file called content.xml."

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