MS Compatibility - backward/forward

[hjhood]

I am a contract outside Program Management Consultant. I have a VISTA system and am considering selecting the OO word processor and spreadsheet s/w instead of MS's. However I work with an organization that uses primarily MS. This means they will send me MS stuff that I will then edit in OO and send back to them so they can read it in their MS format.

A few questions:

Does OO have a Compatibility Guide that specifcally addresses these issues?

Which OO do I download that will be fully compatibile with MS VISTA? Or is there one?

I have searched through and read the OO forums for 'microsoft compatibility' and found a recommendation to add another s/w package to OO - I believe it was a Novell product. Is this a required addition to OO to allow full back and forth compatibility with MS? Is it foolproof? Does it have a price tag?

What questions am I not asking? I don't want to screw this job up!

Best regards, Jim . . .

[kabing]

There is a Migration guide available here that may answer some of your questions.

Currently the "vanilla" version of OpenOffice.org cannot read the new MS Office formats (docx, xlsx, etc.). There are variants such as Go-oo that include converters for the new formats.

The converters for the new formats are reportedly considerably less accurate that the concerts for the older MS Office formats, although they will continue to improve over time.

If you need absolutely perfect conversion, you should stick with Microsoft Office. If you can cope with some differences, OpenOffice.org may be a good choice.

kabing

[warrick nelson]

Converting files is always going to throw up some problems - the more complex the document to convert, the more likely there will be a problem.

I used OOo exclusively for 18 months in one job where I had to share documents with others using MSO 97 and 2003. Every time I had a problem with documents looking strange, I checked on MSO and found that they were indeed strange. It was not the OOo conversion causing a problem. However, I'm now in an environment where we have lots of macros and rather more complex files and conversion often does not work (eg nested tables etc seem to get messed up).

For simple documents, eg relatively simple formatting in letters and articles, conversion works extremely well. However, as kabing notes, if you need 100% compatibility, you need the same package (and I include MSO 2007 vs 2003 in this).

[Hagar Delest]

See also that thread for another example: [Solved] Comments in a MS word document does not show.