[ 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.”