Denmark Chooses ODF Over OOXML

This is great news (hat tip, Darius Damalakas). Danish government institutions will be using ODF for their documents, not OOXML. Not that there aren’t improvements to be made in ODF-producing and ODF-consuming applications (and the standard itself). Even so, it is gratifying to see user-friendly, constituent-friendly choices being made by government agencies.

I wish that American governmental agencies were more concerned about their users and constituents (rather than maintaining a close relationship with a particular vendor). I’m certain that some agencies here would also make the same choice. Not all of them, by any means, but certainly some of them.

If you are aware of a state or federal agency that is thinking about the file formats of their future, I encourage you to contact them and request that they use ODF as their canonical format, even if they also utilize a secondary format (e.g., OOXML, WPD).