Search engine giant Google has become the latest member of the OpenDocument Format Alliance. This alliance was formed to promote a standardized document format to maintain the integrity of data irrespective of the application used to create it.

Google has a minor presence in the word processing market with their recent acquisition of the Writely online application. Writely supports document creation in ODF.

Google also entered the spreadsheet applications market with an online application called Google Spreadsheets. They have not yet announced any plans to support ODF in this application though it should not be far off.

Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF said while confirming this news: “Google is a major player obviously and a tremendous boost to the alliance. It demonstrates the depth and growing support behind the ODF.”