Ian Lynch wrote:
BECTA is the British Education Communication Technology Agency
www.becta.org.uk
The organisation is responsible for government policy in British
education. The October 2005 "Technical specification for institutional
infrastructure" section 2.2 Standards for office productivity
applications specifies:
Applications SHALL create, edit, print and save in open standard file
formats.
Text .txt, .rtf .odt
Spreadsheet .csv .ods
Database .csv .odb
Presentation .html .odp SMIL
Note no .doc, no .xls no .dbf and no .ppt
However, it probably doesn't mean that MS apps can't be used since MSO
can save in rtf csv etc. but it does indicate how government is becoming
increasingly aware of the need to promote open standards.You can down
load the full technical specification from
http://www.becta.org.uk/subsections/foi/documents/technology_and_education_research/techspec_institutional_infrastructure.pdf
Great news. Since Excel files saved in csv format lose formatting,
formulas, charts and other image files etc. it seems to me that BECTA
are saying Excel can't be used unless MS start to support OpenDocument
format. The same is probably true of Access databases saved in csv
(instead of .mdb), as reports, queries, relationships and forms wont be
saved; exporting to csv from Access was only for the actual data in a
table or results of a query (last I used it anyway).
Thanks
--
Michael Devenish
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