Category: Open Document Format

Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty to US Big Tech in the process. Teachers use cloud-based editors to assign homework. School administrators manage documents in proprietary formats. This ecosystem runs smoothly and seemingly without friction, but almost no one questions the cost of this normalisation.

Unfortunately, the cost is quite high.

An invisible resume

Schools don’t just teach maths and history; they also teach mental processes, such as how to do research, think critically and interact with tools and institutions. Software is part of this invisible curriculum. A student who has spent years using Microsoft Word or Google Docs as the archetype of “word processing” or “collaboration” respectively has not developed neutral, transferable skills, but has become a future customer.

This is not a conspiracy, but rather the way markets work. Microsoft and Google both offer heavily discounted or even free licences to educational institutions, knowing that brand loyalty formed in childhood tends to persist into adulthood and the working world. The licence discount is, in commercial terms, the cost of acquiring a new customer, which schools effectively pay on behalf of the seller.

LibreOffice offers an alternative to this approach, teaching students to develop a different type of relationship with their tools.

Privacy and data security

LibreOffice is a free office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux, managed by the non-profit organisation The Document Foundation and developed by a global community of contributors. It offers programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawings and mathematical formulas — in other words, all the functions required in a school environment.

Unlike Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, LibreOffice does not require a subscription or an internet connection. It also does not require the creation of accounts for minors or send data to remote servers. It installs and works locally, so data stays where the user puts it.

For schools operating in areas with poor connectivity — a more widespread reality than one might think — this is not a minor issue, but the difference between a functioning lesson and a frozen loading screen.

For schools concerned about student privacy, the difference is even more significant. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace collect behavioural and usage data, and the terms of service governing the management, storage and use of this data are opaque, complex and subject to change.

LibreOffice does not collect any data, either user or operational, as no account is required to use it and there is no default telemetry. Therefore, there is no data to lose in the event of a malfunction or system breach.

The lesson of open standards

LibreOffice is based on the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard file format that no company owns or controls. Documents created in ODF today will be readable by any ODF-compatible software, even in 20 or 50 years’ time. This is not because the vendor has decided to maintain backward compatibility, but because the standard is public, documented and independent of any commercial interests.

This is extremely important for schools, which are public services funded by citizens and accountable to communities, not private businesses. The documents they produce, such as curricula, assessments, student records and administrative correspondence, belong to the public sphere to a certain extent. Locking these documents into a proprietary format controlled by a single US company creates a form of digital dependency that is incompatible with the commitment of educational institutions to autonomy and critical thinking.

Teaching students to create and share documents in an open format shows them that technology can be responsible and transparent, and that the tools they use do not have to be ‘black boxes’ owned by a company.

The potential lesson of Linux

LibreOffice is the default office suite in most Linux distributions. A school that adopts LibreOffice is a school that has opened the door to using Linux on its personal computers. This is important for budgetary reasons — Linux significantly extends the useful life of older PCs — but also from an educational perspective.

This is demonstrated by the experience of Italian schools in the province of Bolzano, Italy, which use the Linux distribution FUSS (Free Upgrade for a Digitally Sustainable School). On 20 April 2026, it will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a public event where I will talk about the topics covered in this article.

Linux powers the internet, large research centres such as CERN, the world’s top 50 supercomputers, most smartphones and a large proportion of corporate infrastructure with which students will work when they leave school or university.

Students who have grown up using only Windows or Chromebooks have no practical knowledge of how operating systems work, how software is installed and managed, or how IT infrastructure is structured. However, a student who has used a Linux-based system, even in a school setting, will have at least a basic understanding of the fundamentals of modern computing.

This is not an ideological commitment to open source. It is about training graduates who understand the technological world they are entering and the digital tools they will use throughout their lives.

The pitfalls of proprietary software

A student who uses proprietary software throughout their education may unknowingly absorb a series of misconceptions and misinformation:

• That documents reside in the cloud or on someone else’s server as if this were normal and natural.
• Collaboration means sharing access within a supplier’s system.
• That software is a subscription service which is paid for monthly and whose features or price may change at any time.
• That the interface of a tool is defined by what a company has decided to build and not by what users need.
• Lock-in of proprietary formats is an integral part of the system because that’s just how things are.

All of this information is biased and teaches dependency. It serves the long-term commercial interests of suppliers rather than the long-term autonomy of students.

In contrast, LibreOffice lessons teach that software can be free as in freedom, not just free as in price; that file formats can be public standards; that the user community, rather than profit, can be the basis for software development; and that the tools we use can be transparent, modifiable and independent of a single company’s commercial strategies.

An analysis of the counterarguments

Students must learn the tools they will use in the workplace. In theory, this argument has some merit, but in reality, it is inconsistent because the conceptual skills developed with Microsoft 365 — document structuring, formatting, use of styles and spreadsheet formula management — can be transferred to LibreOffice and vice versa. According to the logic of this argument, skills learned on a platform that later changes its interface or mode of delivery from desktop to cloud are not transferable. Microsoft has modified its products several times over the last ten years. The enduring lesson is to learn the concepts, not the menus.

Google Docs facilitates collaboration. This is true within the Google ecosystem. LibreOffice, together with Nextcloud or a similar solution, offers comparable collaboration features without exposing data. However, the problem in this case is the lack of expertise in schools to configure it, which highlights the need for better IT support in education rather than permanent structural dependence on Google.

LibreOffice is more difficult to use. For users who have never used either, the learning curves are comparable, and the perception that Microsoft Office is “easier” largely stems from prior exposure, which itself stems from schools having already made the choice we are questioning.

A concrete proposal

The transition, of course, must not be abrupt or absolute, since this could trigger resistance to change, especially among parents, who in most cases have been victims of the pitfalls of proprietary software.

Schools could start with a few small steps:

• Adopt ODF as the standard format for all documents, regardless of the software used to create them. This would break the format lock-in without requiring an immediate change in software.
• Introduce LibreOffice alongside proprietary tools, allowing all students to work with both and understand the differences in approach between proprietary software and FOSS.
• Migrate administrative workflows to LibreOffice to reduce licensing costs and create institutional familiarity before introducing it in classrooms.
• Collaborating with local FOSS communities for technical support and training would be a form of civic engagement that would benefit both schools and businesses in the area.

None of these small steps represents a radical choice. Many school systems in Europe have adopted these measures, either fully or partially, and experience shows that the transition can be managed and that the benefits are real.

Conclusion

The dominance of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in schools is not the result of these tools being proven to be superior for educational purposes. Rather, it is the result of effective commercial strategies, network effects and institutional inertia. Schools have largely accepted this situation without considering the long-term costs in terms of student data, public budgets, digital sovereignty and the type of digital citizens that schools and universities should be educating.

LibreOffice offers an alternative approach based on open standards, public accountability and independence from commercial platforms. While not perfect, it is a tool that schools can truly own and control.

This is worth much more than a discounted or seemingly free subscription.

The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary.

ARCHIVED MESSAGE

The European Commission has spent years advocating for open standards, vendor neutrality, and digital sovereignty. The European Interoperability Framework explicitly recommends open formats for public sector digital services. The EU’s own Open Source Software Strategy calls for reducing dependency on proprietary technologies, and the Cyber Resilience Act itself is designed to address systemic risks from unaccountable technology dependencies.

On March 3rd, 2026, the European Commission published a request for feedback on to the guidances to be provided in relation to the CRA, which must be provided through the linked spreadsheet in .xlsx format, a proprietary format that makes interoperability extremely difficult due to its ever changing and undocumented features.

This is not a minor procedural oversight. It is a structural bias built into the process which sends out a clear message: full participation in EU policymaking requires a Microsoft licence.
We ask the European Commission to lead by example by following its own guidances in relation to interoperability and at to least provide, alongside the proprietary format generated by the proprietary software and services they use, also an Open Document Format (ODF) file which is an actual interoperable and internationally recognised standard.

While the Commission evaluates plans to upgrade its infrastructure and services to Open Source solutions, with the aim of improving resiliency and reduce risky dependencies, it should implement in its standard procedures the release of documents in ODF format to allow all citizens, organisations and institutions to participate in the democratic processes.

#CyberResilienceAct   #OpenStandards   #DigitalSovereignty   #OpenSource   #LibreOffice   #ODF

CALL FOR ACTION

Dear Commission representatives,

We are writing to provide feedback on a procedural matter that, while perhaps appearing minor at first glance, carries significant implications for the principles underpinning EU digital policy — in particular the commitments to open standards, interoperability, and vendor neutrality that the Commission itself has championed in multiple legislative and strategic contexts.
The stakeholder feedback template for the Cyber Resilience Act Guidance document has been made available exclusively in Microsoft Excel format (.xlsx). This choice is, respectfully, difficult to reconcile with the Commission’s own stated commitments.

The .xlsx format is a proprietary format defined and controlled by Microsoft Corporation, a private entity incorporated in the United States. In fact, although OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500) has been approved as a standard, its implementation has never complied with the specifications of the standard itself, as widely documented in the literature on interoperability. Requiring participants to use this format as the sole vehicle for structured data entry effectively conditions participation in a public consultation on the availability or willingness to use software produced by a single supplier.

This stands in direct contradiction to several principles the EU has advanced:

• The European Interoperability Framework (EIF), which recommends the use of open standards in public sector digital services and the avoidance of lock-in to proprietary technologies.
• The Open Source Software Strategy 2020–2023 and its successor, which promote the use of open source and open standards across EU institutions.
• The spirit, and arguably the letter, of the very Cyber Resilience Act itself, which seeks to reduce systemic risk arising from dependency on unaccountable or opaque technology components.

A consultation process that requires respondents to use a proprietary format produces a structural bias: it disadvantages individuals, organisations, and public administrations that have made the entirely legitimate and EU-endorsed choice to operate on open source software and open formats. A citizen or small organisation using LibreOffice, for instance, may encounter compatibility issues when working with the provided .xlsx template. A government body that has migrated to ODF-based workflows faces an unnecessary obstacle.

The remedy is straightforward. Feedback templates of this kind should be provided in at minimum two formats: one open format (ODF spreadsheet, .ods, being the obvious choice, as it is a true ISO-standardised format with no proprietary ownership) and one widely-used proprietary format for those whose environments require it. Ideally, a plain-text or web-based form would supplement both, removing the spreadsheet dependency entirely for respondents who prefer it.

The Commission’s credibility on digital sovereignty, open standards, and vendor-independent infrastructure is undermined — symbolically but meaningfully — each time its own processes rely exclusively on proprietary formats from non-European technology vendors. The CRA is precisely the kind of legislation where procedural consistency with stated principles matters most.

We respectfully urge the Commission to review its template distribution practices and to adopt a format-neutral approach to stakeholder consultation as standard policy going forward.

Yours faithfully,

Board of Directors
The Document Foundation
Berlin, March 5, 2026

 

Many interpreted the last article in this series as an attack on Microsoft for using the OOXML format against users’ interests. However, this was only one of my objectives, as I also wanted to raise users’ awareness of fake open-source software, such as OnlyOffice, which partners with Microsoft in a strategy to lock users in.

Users are already aware of the advantages of standard, open formats because they access sites every day whose content is accessible thanks to the HTML format. This is a standard, open format that was first developed and then defended by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. He prevented Microsoft from transforming it into a proprietary format with Internet Explorer 6. This forced users to have two versions of a site: one in a standard format and one in a proprietary format.

Fortunately, Microsoft’s strategy failed in the case of HTML because the W3C – unlike the ISO – never recognised the changes to the format “forced” by Internet Explorer as valid. This was because Internet Explorer did not display sites in the standard format correctly. Ultimately, this forced the company to develop a browser that complies with all standards, thus allowing users to choose their preferred browser to access any site.

Had the same thing happened with OOXML, which was recognised by ISO as a standard despite never having been one, users today would be forced to use the Microsoft browser to view sites correctly and would have to tolerate problems with other browsers. The same applies if they want to read and write DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files with open-source software.

However, using a proprietary format for documents also has other drawbacks for users. In this way, they entrust the keys to their own content to someone they do not know, whose interests differ from their own. In the best case scenario, the content is shared, and in the worst case scenario, it is at risk, as the Chief Prosecutor of the International Court of Justice unfortunately learned when Microsoft closed his email account on the orders of the President of the United States.

The same could happen to users of Microsoft 365 if the proprietary format were modified to render it unreadable or readable only by those with a specific version of the software. Is this something that could never happen? Why live with doubt when a standard, open format is available that no country or company can use as a weapon and which anyone can access using software that handles it correctly?

LibreOffice currently handles ODF files perfectly and handles OOXML files better than Windows 365 and other software handle ODF files. Poor handling of ODF files “forces” users towards OOXML files, thus pushing them towards lock-in and protecting a business worth around $30 billion (because lock-in functions like a pair of handcuffs).

We would like all software to adopt ODF as the reference format and handle it correctly in order to offer users true freedom of choice based on software functionality — as would be right in a world based on free competition and innovation, at least in theory.

Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft’s proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for their documents and therefore prefer proprietary software such as OnlyOffice to LibreOffice. Others write outrageous things such as: “OOXML is a standard format, and we have to accept it.”

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to clarify, once and for all, why OOXML has never been, is not, and will never be a standard format unless Microsoft decides to completely redesign its office applications.

I consider this impossible in light of past decisions, such as Excel’s inability to handle elements of the human genome properly. This forced the scientific community to change the names of these elements due to Microsoft’s refusal to fix an obvious Excel bug.

In other words, because of Microsoft, all of us citizens of the world have been affected by the change of the names of some elements of our genome, with all that this entails for scientific research and, consequently, for the treatment of genetic diseases. This is an enormously important fact that has not received sufficient publicity in the media, but it illustrates how willing Microsoft is to overlook everything for its own commercial interests.

But let’s get back to OOXML.

In theory, OOXML (Office Open XML) is an ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 29500), despite heavy technical criticism being raised by many parties during the process and completely ignored by ISO/IEC. This shows that it is not a standard, let alone an open standard.

The following is a summary of these criticisms:

Complexity of specifications: the standard is extremely voluminous (~7,000 pages), making it virtually impossible for third parties to implement correctly. This contrasts sharply with competing standards such as ODF, which are much more concise.

Implementation inconsistencies: Microsoft Office applications do not implement the standardized version (ISO/IEC 29500 Strict), but use the “Transitional” variant, which includes compatibility features with legacy formats that contradict the stated goal of being a clean, modern, and above all open and standard format.

Proprietary dependencies: The specifications refer to several undocumented legacy behaviors of previous versions of Microsoft Office and require implementers to decode Windows-specific features to achieve compatibility.

Binary blob remnants: Despite being based on XML, OOXML incorporates binary data structures in many places, particularly for backward compatibility with legacy formats, and this compromises the transparency that XML should guarantee.

Platform-specific elements: The standard contains Windows-specific elements related to fonts, rendering, and other system behaviors that make any cross-platform implementation difficult or even impossible.

Controversy over the standardization process: The fast-track approval process adopted for OOXML by ISO/IEC was highly controversial, with allegations of procedural irregularities and vote manipulation raising legitimate doubts about the validity of the standard.

These issues meant that, although OOXML technically became a standard, it has always been a proprietary Microsoft format specification and not a truly vendor-neutral open standard.

In the coming weeks, I will explore some of the claims made in this post in detail, with all the relevant technical elements.

For now, anyone interested can take a look at this PDF presentation from 2018, referring to ISO/IEC 29500-1:2016 (and the corresponding ECMA 376), which lists some of the issues and provides technical details that clarify at least some of the claims.

ODF Advocacy - OOXML

Please be aware that some of the slides referring to ECMA 376 are related to an old version of the standard and as such may be obsolete. The presentation will be updated with references to the current version of ECMA 376.