Microsoft KB Archive/68617

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WD6X: Description of Office Document Architecture (ODA)

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Q68617

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The information in this article applies to:


 * Microsoft Word for Windows, versions 2.0, 2.0a, 2.0a-CD, 2.0b, 2.0c, 6.0, 6.0a
 * Microsoft Word for the Macintosh, versions 5.0, 5.1, 5.1a
 * Microsoft Word for MS-DOS, versions 5.0, 5.5, 6.0
 * Microsoft Windows versions 3.0, 3.1

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SUMMARY
Office Document Architecture (ODA) is an international standard for interchanging office documents. It was developed during the 1980s by international committees primarily made up of large corporations. The purpose of the standard is to describe the logical and physical structure of documents so that they can be interchanged across hardware and software platforms without the loss of editing or formatting information.

General Description
The ODA standard defines a hierarchical organization of document content. Each basic logical unit of content is uniquely identified and associated with a layout description that determines how it will be laid out on the page. Groups of basic units, such as lists, paragraphs, sections, and so on, are also associated with their equivalent layout description that determines how the groups are formatted.

The ODA standard is extremely large and complex; it defines an architecture for describing a wide variety of documents, but it is impractical for everyday use. Subsets of the ODA standard have been created to describe specific classes of documents. These subsets are called Document Application Profiles (DAPs). The DAPs are also international standards and three of them are currently progressing through the standard's acceptance process:


 * DAP Level 1 (FOD11) describes text-only documents.
 * DAP Level 2 (FOD26) is intended for word processing (office) documents and describes documents that include text, graphics, headers, footers, and multiple sections.
 * DAP Level 3 (FOD36) describes more complex documents such as those used in desktop publishing applications.

For more information on how to obtain the ODA (FOD-26) converter for use with Word 6.0, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

"Q115783 WinWord 6.0 ODA (FOD-26) Converter Kit Available" Additional query words: textconv conversion converted converts transfer transfers translation translate exchange

Keywords : kbinterop winword macword word6

Issue type : kbinfo

Technology :