Ever been in a presentation or a meeting with people from another company and you want to swap word processed documents? AND as always you agree to swap the files as microsoft word Documents? Well, that has been my experience.

NO LONGER is it necessary to agree on a .doc file. Instead you can choose to use an "Open Document" format. There are five document files that you should know about:

.odt for word processed documents
.ods for spreadsheets
.odp for presentations
.odg for graphics
.odf for formulae

Erwin Tenhumberg at Erwin's StarOffice Tango Insights into Open Source (Why ODF is a safe bet) has a really well written article about Open Document Formats and why it is so easy to swap documents in these new standard formats.

Even if people only have Microsoft Word they can still use these formats as there are now plug-ins you can download for free from Microsoft to enable you to work with these formats. AND what is more, my favorite little word processor (see: Portable Wordprocessing Software), that is so easy to carry from machine to machine, also uses these standard formats!