Open Document Format

Wherever possible I will publish download-able documents in the above format. Typically such documents are published in Microsoft's Office or Works formats (.doc, .xls, etc.) and this can lead to problems.

It may be that you do not own a copy of Microsoft Office (it can be expensive, and bundled copies of MS Works are not necessarily compatible) and in that case it is difficult to view the documents. It is possible to download a copy of the Microsoft Word Viewer application from the MS website, which is free to use. Unfortunately you will be unable to update the documents if that is what you wanted to do.

There is also an Excel Viewer, for use with spreadsheets.

It may be possible that your computer's Operating System does not support Microsoft's products.

To get around this problem it is common to publish in PDF format, as tools to do this are readily available, and the necessary viewer is commonly distributed with most computers, or otherwise is a quick download away.

There is another way however. Microsoft's document format is proprietary and controlled by them. They decide whether your document can be read/written with their Office suite on your computer. Open Document Format is an Open Standards based format for office applications that is free for everyone to use. There are free word processors, spreadsheets and presentation tools available which use this format. These work on many Operating Systems, and are not tied to a particular organisation.

One such commonly used suite is OpenOffice.org . Not only can it read and write Open Document Format documents, but as a bonus it can also read and write most Microsoft Office documents, too.

If you would like to use OpenOffice.org on your computer go to their website and download it. If you need help with this, please contact me at the Webmaster address, and I will do my best to help/advise.