Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I'm new to Open Office and would like to know if I can open the Open Office write and spreadsheet files using MS Word and Excel.

I have MS Office at work and move files back and forth.

I read that you can open WORD and Excel with Open Office, but have not tried this, and will need to open the Open Office files at work with MS Office.

I just didn't want to spend another $200+ for Office with Outlook

In principle, MS Office can work with files in the odt and ods format native to OpenOffice Writer and Calc. All I know in practice is that my MS Office 2007 removes formulas from ods (Calc) documents when saving them, effectively destroying them. This may have been improved in more recent versions of MS Office. On the other hand, OpenOffice can save files in the old .xls and doc formats of Excel and Word, but the filters are not perfect and formatting may be lost. If you really need 100% compatibility, it would be safest to but MS Office. I would be interested to learn how well new versions of MS Office handle Writer and Calc documents. Since OpenOffice is free, you can give it a try with little monetary risk.