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The big picture: Today’s world runs on digital documents, but companies and users face a maze of incompatible proprietary file formats. LibreOffice developers contend that only strictly open standards like ODF can ensure documents remain accessible and reliable across generations of software.

LibreOffice developer The Document Foundation (TDF) is once again reminding users that not all document formats are created equal. Italo Vignoli, TDF’s co-founder, warned that using proprietary formats can render important files unreadable within a few years – though he acknowledged the issue is less critical today than it once was.

The LibreOffice suite was created as a fork of OpenOffice.org, offering an open-source alternative to proprietary suites like Microsoft Office. It is designed to work with documents in the OpenDocument format (ODF) but can read and write other formats with varying levels of compatibility.

The document format is a standardized ISO technology designed to improve reliability and interoperability and is managed transparently by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards consortium. Unlike proprietary formats, ODF provides publicly accessible documentation of its specifications and development process.

Vignoli does not specify which formats ODF should replace, but his post clearly critiques the proprietary technology used by Microsoft Office. Older Office documents may now be impossible to read or render reliably, because Microsoft designed the format to lock users into specific software.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has partially shifted its approach to lock-in by adopting a standardized document format known as Office Open XML (OOXML). However, TDF notes that OOXML documents use XML metadata schemas intentionally designed to be unreadable to competing software.

“In this sense, it is a perfect example of how a language created for simplification, such as XML, can become a subtle lock-in tool if used contrary to its nature,” Vignoli wrote.

When current software becomes obsolete, convoluted specifications like OOXML could create a compatibility nightmare for both home users and organizations in data-critical environments. By contrast, ODF maintains strong backward compatibility across major revisions: files created with ODF 1.0 in 2005 should remain fully readable in ODF-compatible applications in 2025.

Vignoli said people should store data and documents that require long-term preservation in ODF. For documents that are in their final form and require no further editing, PDF is a suitable archival format. Users should also maintain backups and periodically check previously saved files.

While TDF offers sound advice on document formats for long-term preservation, we do not view proprietary formats as a critical issue comparable to the planned obsolescence of major PC operating systems. If you need to open a document from a long-forgotten era, you can use emulation or virtualization to run the original suite on modern machines.