PRESENTING YOUR RESULTS - A Guide to Conducting Online Research - page 152

Many of Microsoft's competitors like OpenOffice.org, Corel and IBM/Lotus
have standardized on a document format called the Open Document Format
(ODF) . There is a movement in governments to support ODF, because of some
issues they face in being able to read documents over a long period of time, past
the time when applications become outdated and obsolete. Microsoft naturally
opposes standardization on a file format not used by its applications, and has
proposed its own file formats as a different standard it calls OOXML (Office
Open XML - not to be confused with OpenOffice). This is the default format for
MS Office 2007 , and the file name extensions are “docx”, “xlsx” and “pptx”. This
format has partial, but not complete approval at this point in time by the inter-
national standards bodies. The conflict between ODF and OOXML is currently
a political battle. Eventually there will be some plug-ins so that applications sup-
porting the Open Document Format can read the Office Open XML formats.
A well-done presentation is very satisfying; regrettably not everyone puts
much effort into the visual appearance of presentations. Charts and graphs can
be excellent aids, but should be simple and concise. Different graphics applica-
tions have different strengths, and the researcher should consider a variety of
graphics tools. Once created in any application, it is a simple matter to copy a
graphic to the presentation, whether it is a text document, auditorium slide
show, or web document.