The move that will be formally announced to the organization's members later on Friday.

"ODF 1.2 is approved as on OASIS standard," said Chet Ensign, director of standards development and TC administration. The specification itself will be published next week, he added. While OASIS rules require that 49 members vote in favor of a standard, ODF 1.2 drew 76 positive votes, a strong sign of support for the spec, Ensign said.

The new specification is a huge improvement over ODF 1.1 which was released in 2006, said Michiel Leenaars, director of the Internet Society Netherlands (ISOC). ISOC is the parent corporation for international organizations that strive to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet by developing standards and protocols.

The most important improvement to ODF 1.2 is the newly built spreadsheet support. The old format was buggy and had a lot of legacy problems. Therefore the new spreadsheet module was written from scratch. “A complete clean room implementation of the spreadsheet formula was built,” said Leenaars in a phone interview.

It is crucial that the specification can handle spreadsheets because they are critical for business use, Leenaars said. In the new ODF format everything considering spreadsheets “is defined and completely specified," he added.