Sy Fine wrote:
I am a very active user of word and excel and planning to buy a new laptop.
Is it safe to switch to OpenOffice instead of MSOffice?
Will OO permit editing of all my present files?
Thanks,
Sy Fine
The operations of MS Office and OOo are similar, and there is good (but
not perfect) compatibility between .them. MS office prior to Office 2007
SP2 does not recognize the Open Document Format filetypes used by
default in OOo, and SP2 has a very non-standard approach to that
standard, so either the Office side needs to have the Sun ODF plugin(*),
or OOo needs to be told to Save As in one of the older Office formats
(not the ones with an x at the end) if you are sending them to somebody
else and they don't have OOo yet. You'll probably get a trial version of
Office on your new laptop, so you can play around with the two (they
coexist peacefully, though you have to manage which one is the default
when you double-click a file to open it).
The major problems I'm aware of have to do with the handling of macros
(they use different languages), field settings, and sounds in
presentations. So if your documents are heavy into that kind of thing,
you may have some issues. But in general, you can probably work just
fine with your old files. You might find the Migration Guide helpful:
documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/0600MG-MigrationGuide.pdf
*
The Sun ODF plugin is at
www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/get.jsp
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