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Make Word and OpenOffice More Compatible
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 12:30 AM on February 6, 2008
Windows warrior Dennis O'Reilly takes a look at making Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org's Writer app play nice together‐as nice as possible, anyway. For those dual-booting, rocking OO.org without Word, or managing with both apps is keeping documents uncluttered with pictures and embedded objects, setting OO.org to always save to Word file formats, and changing a few config options to help Writer do a better job of importing files. The two apps will still argue over the occasional font and formatting differences, but O'Reilly's guide can help you find some common ground on your desktop.
Tags: compatibility | how to | microsoft word | microsoft word tip | openoffice.org
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
inajeep
Posted 2:40 AM 6/2/08
Excellent. I have a mixed environment at home and this should make it a bit easier to open and edit older Word docs.
inajeep
superbryant88
Posted 2:40 AM 6/2/08
This is cool cause i use Open Office on my thumb drive and Linux box but on campus all the computer use Word. so these seems to quell some of the last minute before class "compatibility" problems!
superbryant88
firesign
Posted 3:40 AM 6/2/08
some good tips there. i've used OO for awhile and i like it. it's been nice to be able to do editing of some standard word documents in OO on my eee pc.
firesign
willywag
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
When you say "‐", you're really trying to say "—", or so it appears.
willywag
Kent84
Posted 7:40 AM 6/2/08
Since Leopard's textedit can open .doc files now, how compatible it is with Word. Anyone had any good/bad experiences?
Kent84
2-7offsuit
Posted 8:39 AM 6/2/08
@Kent84: Opening it with text edit will work, but if there's any formatting it will look terrible. I highly recommend NeoOffice. It's just OO for osx.
[www.neooffice.org]
2-7offsuit
2-7offsuit
Posted 8:39 AM 6/2/08
Sorry, a little off topic since it's Excel, but what about vba macros that have been attached to an Excel document? I can't get them to work at all in OO. I'd love to be able to switch to OO at work, but we rely heavily on tons of previously created macros.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
2-7offsuit
Kent84
Posted 9:40 PM 6/2/08
@2-7offsuit: Yea I already have NeoOffice but it takes awhile to load up. I can't wait for the Aqua port of OO to be finished! [porting.openoffice.org]
I think internally when a MS Word doc is opened in Leopard's Textedit, it converts it to .rtf so you lose some formating. I could be wrong though.
Kent84
aliencam
Posted 6:03 AM 8/3/08
@2-7offsuit:
you can open excel files that have macros and programs in them if you use the "Novel edition" of Open Office...otherwise no. it's the same thing, just distributed by Novell and they added in the VB macros/programs... (actually I just looked it up and it is a "downstream edition of Open Office" meaning that they take a version that is not currently released and modify it/make it more stable.)
here is an article on it: [reverendted.wordpress.com]
and you can get the Novell edition of Open Office at download.novell.com (novell edition itself should be a LH article with all the cool stuff it has)
aliencam