About the ability to handle MS Office 2007 files

[damenchoy]

I guess this may be a stupid question but I really have no idea if Open office can handle MS office 2007 file format. Any ideas on this?

Rgds

Damen

[ccornell]

If you take a look in the OpenOffice.org Wiki: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Roadmap you will see that the MS Office12 Import Filter is included in the list of features (MS Office12 is the old name for Office 2007)

It is also mentioned here: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/dev ... e_weekly35

And... if you look here on the OpenOffice.org Wiki, there is some more information:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... 7_files.3F

The short answer is OpenOffice.org 3.0 will have import support. If you cannot wait until then, there are variants on OpenOffice.org that already have (at least some) support for OOXML included.

[Corfy]

Personally, I'm still waiting for Microsoft Office to support the older and more widely used OpenDocument Format. After all, ODF is over 2 and a half years old and is used by OpenOffice.org, Star Office, KOffice, GNOME Office, Google Docs, and many others, (not to mention the fact that ODF is an ISO standard) while Microsoft's OpenXML has only been out for about 10 months and is pretty much limited to Microsoft Office 2007.

[damenchoy]

Thanks for the information. I had done a search but there was no luck to find some variants of Open Office (free version) that runs on Windows Platform supporting this. Can anyone gives any light on this?

[ccornell]

The Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org has support for OOXML. You can get it here: http://go-oo.org/ I know it works in openSUSE. I think it should also work in Windows, but.. I don't use that OS.

For Mac, NeoOffice has OOXML support. http://www.neooffice.org

The Alphas and Betas of OpenOffice.org 3.0 are not far off, and they will also have OOXML support.

[andyqkw]

The roadmaps are subjected to changes and more often late.

So for the planned Apr '08 release of OOo 3.0 beta, I would expect to see it hit the road in May '08 - Jun '08 period or even later.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

While you're waiting for OpenOffice support for DOCX, try the free Wordpad replacement, Jarte. You need to install the Microsoft converters too, but it does open DOCX (saves only as DOC or RTF).

My Review of Jarte

[damenchoy]

I tried the Novell version on Windows platform. Yes it does support opening Word 2007 (docx) file but it looks like it cannot handle the Excel 2007 (xlsx) and Powerpoint 2007 (pptx) file format. Am I correct in this conclusion?

Anyway, this is good enough for me already. But I guess there are some others who are looking for the capability to open Excel and Powerpoint 2007 by Open Office.

Damen

[AndrewZ]

I tried the Novell version on Windows platform. Yes it does support opening Word 2007 (docx) file but it looks like it cannot handle the Excel 2007 (xlsx) and Powerpoint 2007 (pptx) file format. Am I correct in this conclusion?

The Novell OpenOffice.org 2.x versions uses an interim solution OdfConverter (partially developed by Microsoft), and the newer version of OdfConverter 1.1.0+ supports .xlsx and .pptx. OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 will use a completely different mechanism called xmlfilter.

You can use OdfConverter without the Novell version in both Linux and Windows as a command line tool. Some other options include OxygenOffice, Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, Zamzar.com, and Docx2Rtf.

[damenchoy]

Oh, that is a piece of good news. The newer Novell's tool seems to be able to handle the powerpoint and excel 2007 file types. Thanks for the advice!

Rgds

Damen