Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

[Solved] Can I use OO alongside colleagues using Word Excel etc with no problems?

Short answer: Yes.
Alternative answer: It depends.
Longer answer: MS Office file formats are closed, no specification available (well, it seems it's about to change) so the filters have been made by reverse engineering. So small glitches can appear or formatting differences. So it depends on the files you're exchanging. But comments and change record features works well. As OOo is free, just install it and make some tries with your colleagues.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

NB: moved your thread in the Setup forum.

From my experience, Word files (.doc) work best. Only special formatting and complicated table structures may cause problems. Also very large documents are well converted.
Also Excel files (.xls) mainly work well, although there might be some more compatibility issues.
PowerPoint (.ppt) compatibility is very good as long as the presentations only contain text and static graphics. When coming to multimedia content and slide transitions, compatibility is limited.
Macros are not compatible at all, they basically need to be re-written.

So it really depends on which type of documents you mainly need and how complex they are.

You might want to try a search in this forum on MS Office compatibility. This can also give you some ideas on where problems may arise.

Otherwise, I strongly support Hagar's idea to really test with the documents you are working with.

KR, phil

You can query the Issue Tracker to see what issues others have had:

Issue tracking query

Thanks to all I will give it a go

NB: there is one show stopper for me with Calc (at work): the number of columns in DataPilot feature. OOo supports only 8 columns only.
See here: [Issue] More than 8 datafields in datapilot?