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The bill was introduced on Friday by Assemblyman Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, and read on the floor of the state Legislature on Monday. The bill is not yet scheduled for a vote, according to Leno's office, but if passed could go into effect as soon as January 1, 2008. AB 1668's wording particularly excludes the use of proprietary file formats used only by one application, such as those found naturally in Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

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ISO/IEC 26300:2006 defines an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. The schema is suitable for office documents, including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents. ISO/IEC 26300:2006 provides for high-level information suitable for editing documents. It defines suitable XML structures for office documents and is friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based tools. ISO/IEC 26300:2006 first provides an introduction to the OpenDocument format and explains the structure of documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification. It describes the meta information that can be contained in such documents, and their text and paragraph content. Text Fields and text indices are described.

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Although Microsoft Office document formats are the most widely used, OpenDocument has emerged as an alternative with significant vendor backing and with high-profile government customers in Massachusetts and Belgium. OpenDocument is an XML-based format developed under the standards group OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. The decision to manage the project is something of a reversal for Microsoft. Until now, it said that it would not natively support OpenDocument in Office, citing lack of demand. Instead, it would rely instead on third parties for format translators.