Dan Barvitsky

Which formats does OpenOffice support?

What can you extract from the following dialogue between Prospect and Employee?

P: Which formats does <application name> support?
E: Which one are you interested in?
P: Err… Give me all you have!
E: We support many formats, including… which one you were interested in again?

One can, with certain level of confidence, say that:

1. Prospect does not fully know/understand what he/she wants;
2. Employee does not remember from top of his/her head which formats their product supports and does not have a list handy;

If you imagine that employer itself relies on 3rd party components, you may very well end up with #3: employer is not 100% sure which formats are supported by components they use.

It is not a huge secret in ECM world that OpenOffice supports huge variety of formats and has more-or-less appealing API for converting documents; so some people use it to “convert the unconvertible” under the hood of their applications.

Since we are looking into OpenOffice support as well, here is a big question: which formats does the OpenOffice support?

OpenOffice has extendible architecture, so it is hard to say which formats are there. You sure can use the “Open” file command, but, here is a dirty secret, not all stuff OpenOffice can support really is there. Since googling did not give a good answer, so I decided to ask the source. The source code.

Luckily, OpenOffice.org has a common mechanism for registering filters. Namely there is a bunch of XCU files in filter/source/config/fragments/filters. I figured I could use the filter definitions to extract the list of formats I need. So I wrote a simple extraction tool and here is the list I’ve got:

The tool and result files (TXT,OpenOffice and Excel) can be downloaded here.

Needless to say, this list will change from release to release. In order to generate it you will need to download the source code from OpenOffice.org source code download page or directly from their SVN (browse). You will minimally need the filter/source/config/fragments/filters folder.