Yet another question about Office 2007 compatability

[billyboy]

Hi all:

This is my first post here and I'm a bit reluctant, because it seems to me that this particular topic has been flogged to death. But I thought it was worth posting just in case someone has a solution.

My workplace uses windoze (I only recently switched away at home and have no intentions of switching back) and has just moved to Office 2007. I have no problem opening simple documents in OpenOffice, but have a couple of issue that keep cropping up. My work involves producing lot of reports (in Word) that contain embedded (Excel) figures. Nothing complex, just pie charts and bar charts (lots of them). I find that OOo tends to open the reports, but that any embedded figures are stripped out. Just as bad, they are also stripped out of the original spreadsheets.

I'm guessing this has something to do with the way Office 2007 handles embedded Excel objects - in Word, for example, if you paste in an Excel figure it is now fully editable in a way that it was not in previous versions. I've also noticed that the problem does not only affect OOo - even with the compatibility pack installed, Word 2003 has all sorts of problems with embedded Excel objects, frequently displaying half a chart with the rest mysteriously lopped off.

My questions really boil down to this:

1. Has anyone found a way to solve the compatibility problem, so that OOo can handle these things?
2. Is there a workaround in Office 2007, to make the files more convertible into other formats?

As I say, sorry to ask yet another question that's not really about OOo at all, but any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.

Billy.

[floris v]

Don't embed excel files as objects in OOo documents. You will still need Excel to edit the embedded object. So what's the point? If you really want to work with Excel, then get MS Office.

[RoryOF]

If you are in a situation where you need read/write compatibility with MS Office files, then there is no certain solution but to bite the bullet and acquire a copy of the version of MS Office in use at your work. There are always incompatibilities - you yourself have pointed out one with Word 2003 and Excel - but such incompatibilities are much worse across program boundaries.

There is a converter available at
http://katana.oooninja.com/w/odf-converter-integrator
which claims improved Office 2007 compatibility. I know nothing about it, as I fortunately don't have to worry about Office compatibility save at the most rudimentary level.