Ars Technica reports in their lengthy review of Windows 7 (this is a good read for those who want to see an in-depth comparison of Vista and Windows 7) that WordPad in Windows 7 supports OpenOffice .odt files. In some brief experimentation with it, I found Word Pad cable of reproducing the basic formatting that people use most of the time in word processing documents.

News at Ars Technica and Wired News while I was out of town at CCCC in New Orleans. Open XML has been approved as an ISO.

Just noticed that the OpenOffice.org Extensions website looks like it might be using Drupal.

As Bradley Dilger pointed out at an open source workshop during the 2007 Computers and Writing conference last summer, OpenOffice's implementation of styles is one of its strong points in comparison to Microsoft Word. Fortunately for those who are new to OpenOffice, Free Software Magazine's Dmitri Popov has created a tutorial for Creating a book template with Writer. This step by step guide is a good introduction for styles even if one is not trying to create a whole book.