Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard?
It's too early to say for certain, but there are very encouraging signs that the world's standards bodies will vote in favour of a single unified ISO ("International Standards Organisation") document format standard. There is already one document format standard - ODF, and currently the ISO is considering a proposal to bless an alternative, Microsoft's OpenXML, as another standard. In the latest developments, standards committees in South Africa and the United States have both said they will vote against a second standard and thereby issue a strong call for unity and a sensible, open, common standard for business documents in word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.



