openoffice and MS office

Hi,

Each Ubuntu version has a different version of OpenOffice.org. So better choose Ubuntu 9.10 which comes with OOo 3.1.1 for a better inter-operability with MS Office formats.

Each sofwatre has its own native format and it is allways the best to save documents in this native format, that is ODF (odt, ods, odp, odg, etc.) for OpenOffice.org.

OOo enables you to open a variety of documents formats including MS office formats (.doc, xls, .ppt, also docx etc.) and to export your OOo documents in theses formats as well.

The rule for compatibility is : the less you are using specific format layouts, the more the document will be compatible (i.e; causes no problems when imported/exported to an other format). So if you have MS documents with basic formatting, they are certainly 100% OK to be opened under OOo. But if you have been using complex formatiing like embedding pictures, nested tables, merged table cells etc. you may find some light to strong alterations when opening these documents with OOo. Especially if you have Excel spreadsheets with macros you may find some trouble opening them with Calc.

So my advice is to open copies of your old MS Office documents in OOo, save them as ODF (that('s better for archiving as the ODF is a text (XML) compressed format => it uses less storage space than the .doc/.xls/.ppt formats. Save and archive all your new documents as ODF, send copies of them as PDF to other people and only export copies of them as MS office formats when needed (i.e. to send editable copies to someone not using OOo).

For troublesome MS Office documents, if you do not have a regular copy of MS Office, you can always install the MS Word Viewer that is freely downloadable from the Microsoft site. You can install those document viewers with Wine and open MS Office documents as read-only, for viewing and prinitng. Thus you can also use them to check for exported copies of your OOo documents as MS office document formats, especially if you used complex formatting with your OOo documents.

The last MS Office version I used was MS Office 97, since then I have always been using OpenOffice.org (under WIndows, then under Ubuntu). I have installed the MS Word viewer to check on some complex .doc files and compare them to the result when opening with OOo.

Regards