Conception The OpenDocument standard was developed by a Technical Committee (TC) under the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) industry consortium. The ODF-TC has members from a diverse set of companies and individuals. Active TC members have voting rights. Members associated with Sun and IBM have sometimes had a large voting influence. The standardization process involved the developers of many office suites or related document systems. The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was 16 December 2002. OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS standard on 1 May 2005. OASIS submitted the ODF specification to
ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) on 16 November 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules. ISO/IEC standardization for an open document standard including text, spreadsheet and presentation was proposed for the first time in
DKUUG 28 August 2001. After a six-month review period, on 3 May 2006, OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS (Draft International Standard) ballot in
JTC 1 (
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34), with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was "approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard" under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006. After responding to all written ballot comments, and a 30-day default ballot, the OpenDocument
international standard went to publication in ISO, officially published 30 November 2006. In 2006, Garry Edwards, a member of OASIS TC since 2002, along with Sam Hiser and Paul "Marbux" E. Merrell founded the OpenDocument Foundation. The aim of this project was to be an open-source representative of the format in OASIS. As a result, it announced the decision to abandon its namesake format in favor of
W3C's
Compound Document Format (CDF), which was in early stages of its development.
Further standardization Further standardization work with OpenDocument includes: • The
OASIS Committee Specification
OpenDocument 1.0 (second edition) corresponds to the published ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard. The content of ISO/IEC 26300 and OASIS OpenDocument v1.0 2nd ed. is identical. It includes the editorial changes made to address JTC1 ballot comments. It is available in ODF, HTML and PDF formats. •
OpenDocument 1.1 includes additional features to address accessibility concerns. It was approved as an OASIS Standard on 2007-02-01 following a call for vote issued on 2007-01-16. The public announcement was made on 2007-02-13. This version was not initially submitted to ISO/IEC, because it is considered to be a minor update to ODF 1.0 only, and OASIS were working already on ODF 1.2 at the time ODF 1.1 was approved. However it was later submitted to ISO/IEC and published in March 2012 as "ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012 – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.1". a spreadsheet formula specification based on
OpenFormula, It was submitted to the relevant ISO committee under the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) procedure in March 2014. In October 2014, it was unanimously approved as a Draft International Standard. Some comments were raised in the process that needed to be addressed before OpenDocument 1.2 could proceed to become an International Standard. OpenDocument 1.2 was published as ISO/IEC standard on 17 June 2015. •
OpenDocument 1.3 includes additional features for digital signatures, encryption, change-tracking and inter-operability. Version 1.3 of the OpenDocument specification was approved as an OASIS Standard April 2021. The specification was completed as the result of the COSM crowdfunding project seeded by
The Document Foundation. •
OpenDocument 1.4 was approved as an
OASIS Open standard on 2025-12-03. The specification can be found on the Oasis Open site. ==Application support==