Inquiry about this software for company mass use

[nchoudhury]

Hi,

This is Naima Choudhury from Wockhardt Pharmaceuticals. I would like to speak with a customer care asap for relevant application for this software to make sure if this is the software we are looking for.
For example, we are looking to know if this software supports multiple excels files and documents to be collaborated and viewed together to compare.

Regards,
Naima Choudhury

[RusselB]

There is no Customer Care department for Apache Open Office.
This forum is a user based, peer support system where most questions can be asked and answered.
If the question should be directed to another area, eg: feature requests or bug complaints, then we will refer the poster to the appropriate area.
While Open Office has a lot of compatibility with files saved in the Excel formats, there is not (and never will be) 100% compatibility.
The most common problems are due to formatting differences, function parameters (Excel uses commas between parameters, as Calc uses semi-colons), and operational functions (functions that exist in Excel that don't exist in Calc). Eg: IFERROR
From what I read in your query, I would say that Open Office will work for you. You can always try Open Office while maintaining your Microsoft Office formats and access.
If you find that Open Office won't work for you, then you might want to give LibreOffice a try as it has been reported as having better compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free to use and are supported on this forum, though LibreOffice does have it's own section.

If you need more information, my best suggestion is to try Open Office (and/or Libre Office) and determine just what difficulties you are encountering, then post back to the forums in regards to your specific difficulty/ies.

[keme]

OpenOffice supports concurrent access from multiple users, but only for spreadsheets. See this page (link) for details.

Also, as far as I know, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office use different mechanisms for maintaining file integrity with concurrent (network shared) access. This will sometimes lead to problems when both software packages are used in the same environment, accessing the same files. It may also cause trouble if you do not use the native storage format (for OpenOffice, the Open Document Format).

By default Microsoft Office uses the "OOXML transitional" file format, but it can open and save ODF files. Some features of Microsoft Office are not available in OpenOffice.

If you envision using one office suite exclusively, do not depend on extensive document/file collaboration with entities using Microsoft Office, and concurrent file editing (multiple users concurrently accessing the same file) is relevant for spreadsheets only, OpenOffice is ready for deployment in your enterprise.

If your users depend on premade templates for everything (templates which you will get with commercial suites), there will be a period of moaning from users.