BECTA Mandates Open File Formats

BECTA (British Education Communication Technology Agency), the agency in charge of IT for all UK schools, drew up a list of acceptable file formats for office applications:

• Plain text.
• RTF
• CSV
• HTML
• OpenDocument

Download the file

Go to page 26 of this document.

As you can see, the OpenDocument format is in the list, and the Microsoft .doc and MS XML formats are not. BECTA comments on this decision:

Any office application used by institutions must be able to be saved to (and so viewed by others) using a commonly agreed format that ensures an institution is not locked into using specific software. The main aim is for all office based applications to provide functionality to meet the specifications described here (whether licensed software, open source or unlicensed freeware) and thus many application providers could supply the educational institution ICT market.