I understand it's a standard that will ensure documents will work in future generations of office software, across platforms. It seems short-sighted of Apple not to support this international standard.
17" MacBook Pro, Intel Dual-Core 2.66 GHz OS X 10.6.7
It is supported, just not in the iWork Apps.
TextEdit supports it and also Bean [free] and LibreOffice [free].
And yes you are right especially as Apple trashes its own file formats with monotonous regularity.
Peter
Interestingly, Microsoft does a terrible job of supporting this in Office as well. While technically possible, it is not visible in standard editions and has poor support. The standard is not, in fact, widely used. The de-facto standards are .RTF and .DOC/DOCX.
Yes, this. People get grumpy when they receive .odt documents, in my experience. At least in the publishing industry. I know some ardent devotees of LATEX and people who write mostly for the web who use Markdown (hence, ultimately, HTML) for everything -- but nobody who has warm feelings about .odt.
This came up because I was sending a colleague a Word file from my Windows computer at work, and for some reason, it sent it as an .odt file, when in the past it has only ever sent .docx files. He couldn't open it on his iPhone. I had coincidentally just had the same problem receiving an .odt file on my iPhone from someone and trying to read it, unsuccessfully. I was able to open it on my MacBook at home, which defaulted to TextEdit, for which there is no iOS equivalent. iOS Mail has built-in support for .doc and .docx files, so it seems weird that Microsoft Office would be converting stuff to .odt. You'd think Apple would be more interested in it than Microsoft, considering Microsoft's Word is pretty much the standard. After researching it and reading the replies (Thanks!) it seems like no-one uses it much, despite efforts to establish it as a standard. I think it's a grand idea to standardize office document formats, something like when PDF went from "Please Download Adobe Reader" and ZIP files required Stuffit Expander. Now PDFs work everywhere, "seamlessly" and .zip archives are a similar non-issue. Why Apple continues to make Pages and Numbers is beyond me. RIP QuarkXpress, Adobe PageMaker, and hopefully soon Pages and Numbers. At work we have documents in both InDesign and Publisher, for some stupid reason. C'mon, people.
Here's my dream: PDF becomes a cross-platform, Windows, Android, Mac OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and every other OS standard text format that includes exact print formatting. All text-editing and typography/layout software automatically spits out pdfs, and all software is free. Every document you ever get, including emails, print exactly the way they are supposed to, perfectly. And then I wake up.
I am still on IOS 8.4.1, and came across an IOS App Store application by the name of OOReader — which will open and display OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents. I sent myself an .odt as an attachment, and although Apple IOS Mail still doesn't know what to do with it, after you double-tap it to unzip it, you can press and hold on the .odt icon, and a list of supporting applications will be presented — among them OOReader. The .odt document with equations opened perfectly in OOReader. I used the free version of OOReader.
I have no personal or financial interest in OOReader.
Thanks! That seems to work, at least for viewing, if not editing.
The reasons for all those document types are really involved, and there is no way they will be consolidated into some magical single standard. The type of data contained in - for example - an InDesign document is vastly different from a Microsoft Word document, because they have very different goals. InDesign is about absolute precision for the appearance of text and images in the print world, while Word provides very crude layout tools that are primarily aimed at office work. You wouldn't want to layout a magazine in Word, and you wouldn't want to write a sales report in InDesign. The document definitions in those file types reflect those differences.
Most of the file types in wide use are 100% proprietary, and so represent "de facto" standards and not "de jure" (e.g., a file type defined by a standards committee). Microsoft could choose at any moment to change .DOCX, because they own it. Adobe could change how Photoshop reads .PSD files in order to break other products because they own it, and the same is true for InDesign, Excel, etc. All the products that open these files that are NOT from the original manufacturers have reverse-engineered the file types, as Microsoft and Adobe do NOT license that technology.
In practice, de jure standards are rarely good enough because they are not designed by a company with well defined goals and profit to pay for all the work. Most of the de facto standards work because of the popularity of the products with which they are associated, and few will ever enter the official public domain. It is for that reason alone that we may still be seeing .DOCX files 30 years from now, even if Microsoft is gone by then.
It is strictly a viewer.
Why is Open Document Format not supported on Apple machines?
