[LINK] Record Keeping in the electronic environment

[Tom Worthington]

At 03:20 PM 15/10/2008, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>... Record Keeping in the electronic environment ...  compatibility 
>problems with versions of MSWord are there also problems with MSExcel? ...

You could use the ODF ISO standard format 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument>. The ATO can't object to 
that, as it is the format selected by the National Archives of 
Australia for the long term storage of government electronic 
documents, including those from the ATO. Of course the catch is that 
Microsoft Office can't create or read ODF documents. But 
OpenOffice.com can and is free and freely available 
<http://www.openoffice.org/>.

>Though ofcourse the critical one is PDF invoices. ...

You might consider PDF/A format documents. This is the archival 
version of PDF, also known as ISO 
19005-1:2005  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A>. It is a subset of 
the more common versions of PDF and so works with standard PDF 
viewers. That should make it suitable for long term storage. The new 
OpenOffice.com 3.0  has an option for creating PDF/A documents.

ps: The OpenOffice.com web site is a bit overloaded at present. It 
may be all those NSW schools downloading a copy to save money 
<http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/14/2125233>. ;-)


Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University