Compatibility with MS Office 2010

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windling74
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Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by windling74 »

Good morning to you all!
I apologize if I'm not in the right place or if someone already posted the answer (I could not find one).

My name is Andrea, I'm an italian chemist (a bearded male, in case you're wondering, I know, but in Italy Andrea it's only a male name, there's a huge M under Sex in my Identity Card:-) and I've Openoffice 3.2 on a Windows XP Professional operating system. I am a happy user of Openoffice since a long time ago, and I am very grateful for this wonderful software. Years ago Openoffice saved my ass with many .doc 2007 files and I didn't have installed (nor want to) Office 2007. I had 99% compatibility for word excel and powerpoint files, till 2007.

I work as a researcher in Nanotechnology in a Swiss university and my pc has not Office 2010 installed: I don't complain, I use Openoffice if I can, but my problem is that I find more and more files in MSOffice 2010 format.
Since I don't want and can't anyway install MS Office 2010, I was wondering when I will have the possibility to open a MSOffice 2010 file with Openoffice.

Can you someone answer to me about this.


Thank you
Andrea Barbiero
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Compatibility with Office 2010

Post by Hagar Delest »

Hi and welcome to the forum!

The .docx format is a rather dirty format. See for example the first links in that topic: MS Office 2007 OOXML file format (docx, xslx, pptx, ppsx). So using it with something different from MS Office would lead to some surprises. Better avoid it I think.

NB: OOo can open MS Office 2010 files but can't save for the moment. There a lot of topics here about that problem.

Please add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.
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jipex
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by jipex »

Is it known when OOo will be able to save MS Office 2010 files?
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Villeroy
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by Villeroy »

jipex wrote:Is it known when OOo will be able to save MS Office 2010 files?
When MS Office saves ODF files properly.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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esperantisto
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by esperantisto »

Novell’s build of OOo, AFAIK, can export to MS 2007/2010 file formats. But I haven’t checked.
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windling74
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by windling74 »

Thank you for your quick and kind answer!
My problem is that simply I cannot avoid the .docx: some people send to me papers in MSWord 2007 and sometimes I have also to evaluate the visual impact, which is a problem when you are not sure about the formatting.
Sometimes OOo cannot even open Word 2010 files, in my experience.
Thank you Hagar de l'Est for the link and the answer.
Andrea
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keme
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by keme »

Since you are on MS Windows, you can simply use Microsoft's freely available viewers to examine documents if your only need is to read/inspect received documents. If the policy on your computer prevents running those viewers, ask your sysadmin to allow them. It should not be a problem, as the use is "free for all" and they do not represent any vulnerability on the computer as long as you stick to the desktop viewer and stay clear of the ActiveX plugin. I use Word and Powerpoint viewers. I'm not sure if there are viewers for the other MS formats.

If you need conversion between formats, Zamzar is a web service primarily targeted at that task. This kind of conversion is a secondary task from OOo-perspective (OOo is primarily an Office productivity tool). Hence, Zamzar (and similar services and downloadable tools) may yield better results when converting.
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by samurusawyer »

System Requirement for Microsoft Office 2010

Computer and processor: 500 MHz
Memory (RAM): 256 MB
Hard disk: 3 GB
Display: 1024 × 576
OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows Vista
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Villeroy
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Re: Compatibility with MS Office 2010

Post by Villeroy »

My problem is that simply I cannot avoid the .docx: some people send to me papers in MSWord 2007 and sometimes I have also to evaluate the visual impact, which is a problem when you are not sure about the formatting.
This should be not a problem at all. MS Office will support the doc format for the years to come. The old doc format supports almost the same formatting attributes as the new docx does.
Where the docx format includes some new formatting attributes without equivalent in the old doc encoding, you could not see that attribute in OOo anyway.

Apart from this the visual appearance may differ between versions of the same office suite. PDF guaratees that the same document looks the same on any system.

For complex documents there is no alternative to Microsoft software. It is part of their business model to be like that. OOo's ODF file format (odt, ods, odp etc) is designed to be as interoperable as possible. Any application can implement this standard without too much technical issues and with no legal issues at all. Of course MS will never do so even if somebody would donate the entire code to them.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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