Downloading ?

[katy33]

I'm not very computer literate so bare with me, but I am currently in school and my teacher sends assignments to me using Powerpoint, Excel and Word, so will I be able to open them just using Open Office?

[jonedmonton]

Yes, I have not had any problems with that. And do it regularly with my old documents that I created in Office format.

Only caveat: some features of Office 2007 are not yet supported in the current version of OpenOffice.

[acknak]

As long as the files are not sent in the newest MS Office 2007 file format, OpenOffice ("OOo") will open them, and you can save your work in the older MS Office formats as well.

However, you may want to discuss this with your teacher ahead of time, because OOo is not 100% compatible with MS Office and sometimes students get points deducted when their work done in OOo does not match exactly what is produced by MS Office. As long as your teacher has approved ahead of time, then there should be no problem if there is a small difference.

[jonedmonton]

The following is a summary of the PM's I sent in response to additional questions:

Yes, you can send things back, but you MUST use Open Office to convert them to .doc, etc. using Save As and changing the Type, not just the file extension. Microsoft Office cannot read .odt files.

If you are paranoid, you can install the free Microsoft Office Viewer programs to be sure everything worked properly.

I've never tried a Windows 98 install, but it is possible. Reading this page http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/sour ... qs_20.html I'd guess the biggest problem will be the Java, if you haven't upgraded it since Win 98 came out.

Also note the 800 MB free disk space requirement.