Does this look familiar?

If you are on this page, then the above dialog box probably looks familiar. You tried to open an ODF document, but you have no application installed that understands ODF. Windows gave you the above dialog box and offered to show you other applications that could read ODF, and that's how you arrived here.

These is good news. We can help. Apache OpenOffice is a free, open source office suite that can read ODF documents, as well as Microsoft documents.

What are ODF documents?

ODF is an ISO Interational Standard format for office documents, created in 2006. ODF files have the following file extensions:

The advantage of ODF is that it is not tied to any one office applicatation suite. It is an open standard that any company can implement in their software. OpenOffice uses ODF format as its default document format. Most other word processors, of recent vintage, also have the ability to import and export ODF.

Apache OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is published by the non-profit Apache Software Foundation. OpenOffice is available in many languages and works on all common computers. OpenOffice can work with ODF documents as well as documents from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

If you want to read more about Apache OpenOffice, you can look here.

So what do I need to do to read my ODF document?

Download Apache OpenOffice and install it on your machine. It only takes a few minutes to download and install. Once you have it installed you will be able to read and write ODF documents.