Set for March 26, the first annual Document Freedom Day is an event that hopes to raise awareness for increased accessibility to public documents. Currently electronic documents are saved in a great variety of formats (ie. .doc, .xls, .rtf, .ppt). If a computer user wishes to open a saved file in a particular format, it is necessary to possess or go purchase specific computer software. Propriety software companies reap in millions of dollars with each software upgrade that people run to the stores to purchase in order to read electronic documents.

Participants in Document Freedom Day will share information about the importance of a standard open document format so ALL people can read the documents that they access.

Hopefully this introduction to Open Document Format (click to download) provided by the Open Document Format Alliance along with Wikipedia’s description of ODF will help answer your questions about ODF and the efforts of the Alliance to educate the world. By continuing my research, I found the following .pdf (open format) slideshow created by the Open Document Format Alliance.

Open Document Format Slideshow

Stay tuned for more information.