LibreOffice says your documents should survive for ‘generations’

LibreOffice and other office suites are built around the Open Document Format, or ODF for short, which has a few important advantages over Microsoft Office files and other formats. That includes the ability to open your files years or decades after they were created, as the LibreOffice folks just pointed out.

The Open Document format is the native file format of LibreOffice, and OpenOffice before that, and it has been adopted by other software like KDE Calligra and Microsoft Office. It’s most recognizable as the .ODT file extension for text documents, .ODS for spreadsheets, .ODP for presentations, and .ODG for illustrations and graphics.

A new blog post on The Document Foundation’s blog explains, “Digital documents in proprietary formats often become inaccessible within a few years due to undocumented changes to the XML schema that are intentionally employed for lock-in purposes. To avoid this problem, it is advisable to use the Open Document Format (ODF) not only for everyday tasks, but also for long-term storage. This ensures that documents remain accessible for years or even generations.”

Even though Microsoft Office documents can be opened by many non-Microsoft applications, the files can often appear broken, because those apps are relying on reverse-engineered solutions. Microsoft is not forthcoming about all the intricacies of the Office file format, because the lack of interoperability is a fantastic lock-in mechanism. “Keep paying for Microsoft Office for all your files to keep working” is an effective tactic, unfortunately.

There are a few other reasons that ODF is ideal for long-term document storage, though some of its features also apply to other formats. Fonts, images, videos, and other resources can be stored inside the file, instead of relying on external resources that might stop working in the future. The file’s title, creation date, subject, author, and other metadata is also easily accessible, which helps with archival tasks.

So far, the Open Document Format is proving to be a great solution for long-term document storage. The blog post also said, “all files created with ODF 1.0 in 2005 — immediately after standardisation by OASIS — can be opened without issue by applications released in 2025. This stability is intentional; the format was designed with long-term preservation in mind.”

However, the LibreOffice team still recommends backing up your files in multiple locations, and you should ideally check your important documents every once in a while for possible data corruption. For files that should never be modified, the developers recommend exporting to a PDF/A file.

LibreOffice supports a wide range of document formats, including ones built for long-dead applications AppleWorks and IBM/Lotus SmartSuite. If you need to keep your files working for as long as possible, though, there’s a strong case for using the Open Document Format.

Source: The Document Foundation Blog