[Solved] Will I have compatibility issues with MS Office?

[quarkrad]

Forgive me for asking but having just lost the argument with a friend not to buy MS Office - are there features in MS Office (specifically Word & Excel) that ooo cannot deliver? The argument was that MS Office is use at work so I need it at home - I would have thought that for the majority of users, who do not use anything like 100% of the functionality, there is no/little difference. But perhaps I'm wrong.

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases your chances of a reply. (TheGurkha, Moderator)

[RPG]

Hello

I think start working with OOo. When you discover problems so you cannot continue with OOo then you can always buy MSO.

Romke

[acknak]

There are important differences and I think it's a real stretch to treat OOo as a "free replacement" for MSO.

Speaking for myself, and I prefer OOo, if I had to use MSO for work and I needed to take work home with me, there's no way I'd be trying to use OOo to do it. There are just too many compatibility glitches when you try to edit the same documents with different software. Sure, try it out, it's free, but no experiment would convince me that a problem would never happen--and at the worst possible time, I'm guessing.

Of course, there's no way that I'm going to pay for MSO just so I can work at home, either.

[Villeroy]

My experience with MS Office documents is very limited. Unless the documents were extremely simple, they used to be in awful quality (spacing by spaces, hundreds of hard formattings). In these cases I am the one who feels obliged to fix the document and send back a clean, new doc/xls copy with correct paragraph styles, simplified table layout and commonly used fonts. Until now it was always my version of the file that has been accepted for ongoing collaborative editing (2 docs and 1 xls in the past few months).

When collaborative editing is not a requirement, I always send my documents as pdf (menu:File>Send>Send as PDF).

Most people give up when a doc is looking a bit strange due to one particular spacing or font setting. Others are extremely picky about miniscule details. Compatibility is granted when the other side can read and edit my files properly. This way round, the .doc and .xls documents produced by OOo tend to be very compatible.
If I want my software to read each and every .doc file in the exact same manner as WinWord does, then I need MS Office or some software that includes an exact clone of their file filters which would also imply the exact same set of features. Such a clone will never exist. It would be far more expensive than the original.

To make things worse, simplistic editing in MS Office produces very complicated document structures whereas more professional editing tends to produce simple document structures. Most of today's office users are unable to use text processors efficiently. Nobody ever reads a book on MS Word, so they think all the time saving features they don't know are expert features.

[PGAGA]

Saturday, March 10, 2012

In addition to the above:

[1] You do not need to buy office. If you have to use work sofrware at home, the MS license will likely let you install at home (at least in the past was how the MS license worked). If this has changed, then work should provide you with a license for home.

[2] There is no guarantee that a file created on one installation of Office will work on another.

[3] Three you can convince your work to go with IBM's standard format, ODF.

Phil

[acknak]

...
[2] There is no guarantee that a file created on one installation of Office will work on another.
...

This is the really unfortunate part: if you all use MS Office and a problem occurs--not unlikely, I'd agree--everyone takes it as normal.

But if there's a problem with the document and you're using OpenOffice instead of MS Office, OOo is likely to get the blame (deserved or not), and you're guilty by association.

Editing documents with different software is a minefield. Sure, it's possible you'll pass through unscathed, but it's better to just avoid it, given the option.

[acknak]

PS: Perfect example of the minefield: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... =7&t=48959